Contemporary Art from Cyprus: Politics, Identities, and Cultures across Borders 9781350198647, 9781350198678, 9781350198661

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Contemporary Art from Cyprus

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Contemporary Art from Cyprus Politics, Identities, and Cultures across Borders Edited by Elena Stylianou, Evanthia Tselika, and Gabriel Koureas

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Selection and editorial matter © Elena Stylianou, Evanthia Tselika and Gabriel Koureas, 2021 Individual chapters © their authors, 2021 Elena Stylianou, Evanthia Tselika and Gabriel Koureas have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Ben Anslow Cover image: Jonathan Cook, fUN, 91.44 x 76.2cm, Oil on Canvas, 2013. Presented in the exhibition ‘How many shades would an artist pack for holidays?’ The Fffast Summer Residency, Neoterismoi Toumazou. Image courtesy of the artist. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stylianou, Elena, editor. | Tselika, Evanthia, editor. | Koureas, Gabriel, editor. Title: Contemporary art from Cyprus : politics, identities and cultures across borders / edited by Elena Stylianou, Evanthia Tselika and Gabriel Koureas. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020038474 (print) | LCCN 2020038475 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350198647 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350198654 (epub) | ISBN 9781350198661 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Art–Political aspects–Cyprus–History–20th century. | Art and society–Cyprus–History–20th century. | Art–Political aspects–Cyprus–History– 21st century. | Art and society–Cyprus–History–21st century. Classification: LCC N72.P6 C66 2021 (print) | LCC N72.P6 (ebook) | DDC 700.95693/0904–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038474 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038475 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-9864-7 ePDF: 978-1-3501-9866-1 eBook: 978-1-3501-9865-4 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printed and bound in Great Britain To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Contemporary Art from Cyprus: Politics, Identities, and Cultures across Borders  Elena Stylianou, Evanthia Tselika, and Gabriel Koureas

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Part 1  Shaping an Art Scene 1 2

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Art History as Narration: Ideological Configurations of Greek-Cypriot Modernity in Art  Louli Michaelidou From Narration to Dialogue? Thinking about the Way We Talk about Contemporary Visual Art in the Turkish Cypriot Community  Esra Plumer Bardak Becoming and Being a Visual Artist in the Republic of Cyprus: The Prominence of the Artist-Identity  Niki Zanti-Philiastides Peripheral Visions: The “Peripheral” Position as Productive of Artistic Process  Marina Kassianidou

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37 53 67

Part 2  Challenging Identities 5 6

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A Forgotten Anglo-Cypriot Partnership: Glyn Hughes, Christoforos Savva, and the Apophasis Gallery in the Early 1960s  Yiannis Toumazis Who Are We, Where Do We Come from, Where Are We Going to?: Writing Greek Cypriot Women’s Art Histories in Contemporary Cyprus  Maria Photiou Nicosia’s Queer Art Subculture: Outside and Inside Formal Institutions  Marilena Zackheos and Nicos Philippou

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Part 3  Excavating Place 8

Tracing the Local: Sense of Place and Identity in the Cypriot Landscape  Elena Parpa

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The Ground Beneath Our Feet: A Discussion on Contemporary Art and Archaeology in Cyprus  Participating Artists: Alev Adil, Haris Epaminonda, Maria Loizidou, and Christodoulos Panayiotou. Organized by Gabriel Koureas, Elena Parpa, and Christina Lambrou 10 The Dig, the Fragment, and the Archive: The Archaeological Imaginary in Greek-Cypriot Contemporary Art  Elena Stylianou and Artemis Eleftheriadou

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Part 4  Negotiating Politics 11 Transcultural Memory (Re)-Mediations in Cypriot Art History and Contemporary Art  Gabriel Koureas 12 Two-Folded Account on the Attempt to Understand the Potential Source of Change in Cyprus  Basak Senova 13 Conflict Transformation Art in Nicosia: Engaging Social Groups across the Divided City through Artistic Practices  Evanthia Tselika Index

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Illustrations 2.1 Kültür Sanat Dergisi (Culture Art Review), Issue 10, September 1992 2.2 Nurtane Karagil discussing Happening, December 27, 2013 2.3 Ugur Bahceci discussing Happening, December 27, 2013 4.1 Marina Kassianidou, Stain Painting (detail), 2008–9 4.2 Marina Kassianidou, Stain Painting, 2008–9 4.3 Marina Kassianidou, Plans and Renovations (exhibition view), 2014 4.4 Marina Kassianidou, Wall Drawing I, 2010 5.1 Glyn Hughes and Christoforos Savva in the Courtyard of Apophasis Gallery 1 at Sophocleous Street 5.2 Glyn Hughes, The Athlete, 1962; Christoforos Savva, The Athlete, 1962 5.3 Christoforos Savva, Small Collage on Apophasis Gallery Letter Headed Paper, 1963 5.4 Christoforos Savva, 6|July h.b. glyn (Happy Birthday), 1967 6.1 Loukia Nicolaidou, At the Fields, c.1933 6.2 Rhea Baily, Memories of the Yard, 1976 7.1 Stavros Stavrou Karayanni performing “Aphrodite: Courtesan of the Word” in At Maroudia’s 7.2 Still from Urban Drag, featuring Despina Michaelidou, 2014 7.3 Graffiti in the Phaneromeni Square area 8.1 Stelios Kallinikou, Ayios Sozomenos, 2015 8.2 Stelios Kallinikou, Palm Trees (from the series Local Studies), 2016 8.3 Neoterismoi Toumazou, A Land Rover Approached the Village (Black Rainbow) [installation view], 2017 8.4 Haris Epaminonda, Chapters (film-still), 2013 9.1 Haris Epaminonda, Installation view from VOL. XXIII, Secession, Vienna, 2018 9.2 Haris Epaminonda, Untitled #02 b/h, 2015 9.3 Maria Loizidou, A Transfer, NEON City Project 2015 9.4 Maria Loizidou, Curating Body/The Cached Space, Cyprus Museum, 2014 9.5 Christodoulos Panayiotou, Spoil Heap, 2015 9.6 Christodoulos Panayiotou, 74.51.2472 (Lifesize Bearded Votary in Egyptian Dress), 2015

40 46 46 72 73 75 76 92 96 97 98 108 111 128 129 131 145 146 148 150 156 157 158 159 160 161

viii   9.7   9.8   9.9 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 13.1 13.2 13.3

Illustrations Alev Adil, Becoming Afraditi, 2016 Alev Adil, Aphrodite to Mary, 2011 Alev Adil, Drowned Genealogy, 2016 Elizabeth Hoak-Doering, Three Ships from St. George of the Greeks Socratis Socratous, Casts of an Island, 2015 Savvas Christodoulides, Sleeping with the Hand Upright, 2012 Savvas Christodoulides, Young Muslim Woman (Chanoumaki), 2014 Klitsa Antoniou, Experimental Storytelling (2009) Özge Ertanin, Proposition, presented at Maroudia’s, Re-Aphrodite exhibition (2012–13) Lia Lapithi, An Ethnic Food for the Ethnological Museum … Moussaka (2012) Katerina Attalidou and Stefanos Karababas, I Don’t Know if I Am Convincing; the City Seems Not to Trust Me Any More, 2011 Nicosia International Airport Christina Georgiou and Oya Akın’s performance “Voicing the Line” under the coverage of the Stepping Over the Borders Exhibition, 2015 Christina Georgiou and Oya Akın’s performance “Voicing the Line” under the coverage of the Stepping Over the Borders Exhibition, 2015 Andreas Savva, Waiting Lounge, 2011 Haris Pellapaisiotis, Photograph. Presented in the Off Limits exhibition, 1992 Emin Çizenel, The First Supper: One of You Will Not Betray Me, 1999–2000 Participant response maps to the Call#192 bus rides, 2005. AA + U (Socrates Stratis—Maria Loizidou) and Haris Pellapaisiotis

162 163 164 177 180 183 184 200 202 203 205 214 218 219 220 231 233 236

Contributors Alev Adil is a poet and performance artist who has performed at Tate Britain, the British Museum, and The Royal Maritime Museum amongst other venues in London and internationally. Her poetry has been included in many anthologies of Cypriot poetry and her collection of poems Venus Infers was praised as “both a passport and a trip to new and unimagined communities.” She has a PhD in multimedia poetics from Central Saint Martin’s, the University of the Arts, and extensive experience of teaching art and literature at BA and MA level in universities in the UK and elsewhere. Alev is also a literary critic who currently reviews for The Times Literary Supplement. Esra Plumer Bardak is Assistant Professor at Arkin University of Creative Arts and Design, Cyprus. Her research focuses on twentieth-century artistic practices, intersections between art and psychiatry, life writing, and twenty-first century approaches to canon studies. She has published monographic studies on Unica Zürn, Gönen Atakol, İsmet Tatar. Her most recent publications include Synchronicity, Abstract Symbolism and The Use of Variations In Ayhan Menteş’ Visual Work (2020). She is also editor of an upcoming anthology on Ayhan Menteş’s life and work. Artemis Eleftheriadou is an Associate Professor at the Arts and Communication Department at Frederick University, Cyprus. Her research focuses on contemporary artistic practices and interdisciplinary visual communication. Recent projects include the Ar(t)chaeoloy Project: Intersections of Archaeology and Photography, (co-curator), Nicosia 2019, the artists book Cyprus: Island of Aphrodite II, (creative director), Nicosia 2020. Her most recent publications include Visual Infotainment in the Political News: A Cultural Approach in the Post-truth Era, (co-author), MedieKultur 2019, SMID. She is currently the editor of the International Association of Photography and Theory Press. Haris Epaminonda is a visual artist who works between Berlin and Nicosia. Selected solo exhibitions include Secession, Vienna (2018); Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2017); CAAC, Seville (2016); Le Plateau, Paris (2015); Villa du Parc, Annemasse (2015); Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice (2014); Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia (2013); Modern Art Oxford (2013); Kunsthaus Zürich (2013). Epaminonda co-represented Cyprus at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Selected group shows include the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); Werkleitz, Dessau (2019); Archeological Museum, Mykonos (2019); Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2019); Fondation Hippocrene, Paris (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Madre Museum, Naples (2017); Jewish Museum, New York (2017); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2016).

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Marina Kassianidou is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a visual artist whose work focuses on relationships between mark and surface. Her practice combines painting, drawing, collage, installation, site-specific work, and art writing. She has published the books How to Know: A Space (2016), Μπαίνοντας στην εικόνα οι λέξεις (When Words Enter the Picture) (2017), and Exercise Book (2018). Selected awards include a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant and fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hambidge Center, and Ragdale Foundation. Gabriel Koureas is Research Fellow at the Department of History of Art, Birkbeck, University of London. His research concentrates on the memory and representation of conflict in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in museums and visual culture. His publications include works on the commemoration of the First World War, art and the senses, the gendered representation of the terrorist, the visual culture of colonial wars of independence and transcultural memories in contemporary art of the Middle East and the Mediterranean. His most recent publications include a special issue of the Journal of Memory Studies (2019) on Ottoman transcultural memories. Christina Lambrou is an arts writer and researcher based in Nicosia, Cyprus. Her work explores the relations between nationalism and colonialism in twentieth-century artistic practice outside of the western canon. She is a PhD candidate in History of Art at the Visual and Material Culture Research Centre, Kingston University, London, where her research focuses on the cultural production of Greek Cypriot painter and intellectual Adamantios Diamantis (1900–94) examining his practice in relation to the process of modernization in Cypriot society and modernisms in the visual field. She has published on contemporary visual culture in Cyprus, modernity, and the role of the visual in the political. Maria Loizidou is a visual artist, interested in the conception of in situ projects in workshops, video and audio installations that investigate the “power of fragility.” Selected international group exhibitions include the documenta 14, Kassel 2017, the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2016 (group participation), and the Cairo Biennale in 2010. She represented Cyprus at the 42nd Venice Biennale in 1986. She has created public projects (Kerameikos, City Project in collaboration with NEON, Athens, 2015) and permanent installations (Fatima, 2007, Futuroscope, Poitiers, 1991). In 2013, she was shortlisted for the QMA & Fondazione Prada Curate Award. Selected invited solo shows include the VHDG (Leeuwarden), the MAMC (Saint Etienne), the Musée des Beaux Arts de Lyon, the Benaki Museum and the EMST (Athens). Louli Michaelidou works at the Cyprus Ministry of Education, Culture, Youth and Sport (Visual Arts). She has a background in the social sciences and holds a PhD in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art. Her research draws on social anthropology, postcolonial theory, and art criticism to consider issues of art, politics, and modernity in post-independence Cyprus. Her most recent publications include Cyprus in Venice: Art, Politics, and Modernity at the Margins of Europe (On

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Curating - Issue 46 / June 2020). She has co-curated and produced a number of survey and contemporary art shows and has been commissioner for Cyprus at the Venice Biennale since 2003. She is currently involved in the establishment of the Cyprus Museum of Contemporary Art. Christodoulos Panayiotou’s wide-ranging research focuses on the identification and uncovering of hidden narratives in the visual records of history and time. Selected solo exhibitions include the 56th Venice Biennial, the Cyprus Pavilion; Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Kunsthalle Zürich; Casino Luxembourg; CCA Kitakyushu; Museum of Contemporary Art, St. Louis. He collaborated on the conception of the Emma Kunz—Visionary Drawings exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery (2019). Selected group exhibitions include the 8th Melle Biennale; the 14th Lyon Biennial; the 13th Sharjah Biennial; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel; 8th Berlin Biennale; 7th Liverpool Biennial; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museion, Bolzano; Migros Museum, Zürich; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. Elena Parpa is an art researcher, writer, and curator. Her principal area of inquiry concerns the visual culture and cultural politics of landscape and its crossover with ideas of place, belonging, memory, and history in works by artists active in contested geographies. She has curated Planetes, an international exhibition, part of the inaugural program of Pafos2017, European Capital of Culture. Her essays appear in edited volumes and books, including the ‘Daybook’ of documenta14 (2017) and she is the writer of the second issue of Next Spring (2018). She is currently a Scientific Collaborator at the Department of Design and Multimedia, University of Nicosia, and at the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts, Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol. Nicos Philippou is Lecturer at the Department of Communications at the University of Nicosia. He has published on photography and visual culture in Cyprus. He is author of Coffee-house Embellishments (2008) and co-editor of Re-envisioning Cyprus (2010) and Photography and Cyprus: Time, Place and Identity (2014). He recently co-authored Greek Cypriot Locality: (Re)defining Our Understanding of European Modernity (2017), published in the volume A Companion to Modern Art, and Miniature Landscapes: Sharqi, the Instant Photograph, and the Re-invention of Cyprus (2019), published in photographies. Maria Photiou is an Art Historian and a Research Fellow at the University of Derby, UK. She completed her PhD on Rethinking the History of Cypriot Art: Greek Cypriot Women Artists in Cyprus at Loughborough University. Her research focuses on women’s art practices and the connections between migration, gender, memory, and the politics of belonging. Publications include The Green Line: Greek Cypriot Women Artists’ Politicised Practices (n.paradoxa) and Be/come Closer to Home: Narratives of Contested Lands in the Visual Practices of Katerina Attalidou and Alexandra Handal (Third Text). She is co-editor of the upcoming anthology Art, Borders and Belonging: On Home and Migration (Bloomsbury).

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Basak Senova is Associate Professor Dr. and Visiting Professor at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. She has curated the Pavilion of Turkey and Northern Macedonia at the Venice Biennale (2009 and 2015); Helsinki Photography Biennial and the Jerusalem Show VII (2014); UNCOVERED (Cyprus); the 2nd and 5th Biennial of Contemporary Art, D-0 ARK Underground (BiH, 2013 and 2019); Lines of Passage (Lesvos, 2016) and Climbing through the Tide (Tunis, 2019) and CrossSections (Vienna, Helsinki, Stockholm, 2017–19). She is running a research-based educational program “The Octopus Programme” together with Barbara Putz-Plecko at the University of Applied Arts. Elena Stylianou is Associate Professor in Art and Art History at European University Cyprus and President of the International Association of Photography and Theory (IAPT). She has published widely on contemporary art and photography, as well as on museums with particular emphasis on the uses of technologies and curatorial practices. She is co-editor of Museums and Photography: The Display of Death (Routledge, 2018) and Ar(t)chaeology: Intersections of Photography and Archaeology (IAPT Press, 2019). She is recipient of numerous awards and grants. She has curated a number of international exhibitions of contemporary art in Cyprus and she is the lead researcher of many funded projects. Yiannis Toumazis is the Director of NiMAC [The Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre Associated with the Pierides Foundation] and Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Communication of Frederick University, Nicosia. Since 1994, he has curated more than one hundred contemporary art exhibitions both in Cyprus and abroad, including the Cyprus Pavilion “Temporal Taxonomy” at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). He is the author of Marcel Duchamp: Artiste Androgyne (Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2013) and of numerous contemporary art exhibition catalogues, articles, and publications. He has been invited to join the jury for the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography for the year 2020. Evanthia Tselika is Assistant Professor specializing in art history and theory at the University of Nicosia. Her research concentrates on the social practices of art, with a particular focus on the commons and conflict transformation, as well as visual cultural histories of the twentieth century. She collaborates with art centres and museums locally and internationally, and is involved in coordinating and curating European level funded programs, such as the Interreg Balkan Med project Phygital (2017–20). Her articles are published in journals such as Visual Studies and Public Art Dialogue and commissioned by organizations such as Peace Research Institute Oslo. http:// evanthiatselika.com. Marilena Zackheos is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Nicosia. She has published on postcolonial literary and cultural studies, psychoanalysis and trauma, gender and sexuality. She is co-editor of Vile Women: Female Evil in Fact, Fiction, and Mythology (2014), From Cyprus with Love (2016), and Education in a Multicultural Cyprus (2017). Other recent work includes “Revisiting Female Intimacy

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in Luz María Umpierre-Herrera’s The Margarita Poems” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies (2016) and “Misogynism as Disidentification” in the volume Revisiting Sexualities in the 21st Century (2015). Niki Zanti-Philiastides is an art consultant, a cultural manager, and an academic. She curates collections of high-quality artworks that tell a story and add value to properties within the international hospitality industry; provides arts and cultural organizations and creative individuals with bespoke strategies in the areas of arts education, marketing, fundraising, and evaluation; and maintains a scholarly teaching practice in the areas of cultural policy, arts management, and professional practice in the arts. Niki holds a PhD in Arts Management from Birkbeck College, University of London, an MA in Arts and Heritage Management from London Metropolitan University, and a BA in Fine Arts from the University of West of England.

Acknowledgments This publication was made possible with the support of the Murray Bequest, Department of History of Art, School of the Arts, Birkbeck University of London.

Introduction: Contemporary Art from Cyprus: Politics, Identities, and Cultures across Borders Elena Stylianou, Evanthia Tselika, and Gabriel Koureas

This edited volume explores the tensions between the global and local, identity politics, ethnic conflict, and borderlands in contemporary art practices from Cyprus—an island on the fringes of both Europe and the Middle East. Although the book is by no means a complete historiographical record of contemporary Cypriot art, it has a critical role in being the first to position art from the island in dialogue with the global art scene. Furthermore, it challenges assumptions of present artistic practice as uniquely Cypriot—solely based on claims around the country’s troubled history and local politics—and puts forward discussions and debates relevant to the artificiality and problematics of the perceived boundaries of Western art. In effect, the collection provides a much-needed response to the growing global interest in the notion of the “local” and the acknowledgment of locality’s impact on further shaping, defining, and revising orthodox understandings of Western European modernity. More specifically, this collection of essays attempts to tackle issues that are considered topical, pressing, and relevant in and beyond Cyprus. It thus approaches contemporary art from the island in a manner neither isolated nor disconnected from the context of our global realities1 and by means of critical reflection on locality, identity, and conflict. The themes that emerge include, but are not limited to, the shaping of the local art scene and developing a late-blooming fine art system influenced by a “Western” art-historical discourse and a colonial past; the emergence of the “periphery”; the importance of place and thriving localities in global times; issues around memory and artists’ identities; gender politics and conflict; the use of material culture and the politics of archaeology; how the borders that describe the socio- and geo-political fabric of the island have shaped artistic production.

Cyprus and Its Troubled Past Overlapping layers of conquest and control2 reveal the history of Cyprus as a series of semi-transparent colonialisms that have morphed into landscapes that speak of a multicultural past—but also a multi-layered social and cultural make-up—that has only

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recently been reinterpreted by historical, anthropological, and cultural theory. Cyprus has also been marred by years of ethnic conflict between its two main communities: Greek and Turkish, which in the island’s modern history has been largely referred to as “the Cyprus problem.” While commentators such as Hubert and Solomou see the roots of the Cyprus problem in the British policy of “divide and rule,” which came with the establishment of a police force composed of members of the Turkish minority,3 the anthropologist Rebecca Bryant traces the start of the ethnic conflict to the beginning of British colonial rule in 1878 and the concurrent adoption of new ideals of freedom among the locals. Breaking with the traditional hierarchies of Ottoman rule (1571–1878), the British colonial administration imported the modernity of representational politics and Cypriots began to imagine a better future for themselves, demanding freedom, equality, and representative politics that in turn led to two distinct nationalisms on the island.4 Under the newly established political system, the two communities came to define themselves as citizens along ethnic lines. The growth of the new ethnonationalisms led to calls for union with the “motherlands” of Greece and Turkey, respectively.5 As of 1878, Cyprus thus experienced sporadic outbursts of nationalist feeling in the form of declarations, demonstrations, and uprisings. The insurgencies against British imperial rule by the Greek-speaking subjects of the colony who called for union of the island with Greece escalated in the middle of the twentieth century. By April 1955, Greek-Cypriot riots and demonstrations had developed into open conflict with the British colonial administration and resulted in an organized movement, EOKA (National Organization of Cypriot Fighters). The Turkish-Cypriot community—wholly against the idea of unification with Greece—joined the British forces or otherwise took up arms against EOKA.6 The ethnically driven inter-communal conflict only escalated upon the birth of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960. The British colonial administration had withdrawn, leaving in its stead a bi-communal government, which aimed to grant equality to the Greek majority and the Turkish minority. The complex, almost unworkable, and indeed shortlived constitution imposed by the British had failed completely by 1963, pushing the two communities toward renewed violence and partial segregation. Another wave of violence that started in 1967 culminated in a coup d’état in Cyprus in 1974, orchestrated by the military dictatorship in Greece. Turkey, as one of the guarantor powers, invaded the island in order to protect the Turkish-Cypriot community. Ultimately, the conflict culminated in the creation of the line that divides the island into the military-controlled Greek sector in the south of the island and the Turkish one in the north. The division remains to this day. The events of 1974 are known on the south side of the dividing line as the “Turkish invasion” and on the north as the “peace operation,”7 revealing the complexity of the political and cultural condition on the island. The Green Line, the demarcation that divides the island, along with the Buffer Zone, the no-man’s land on either side of the line, extends from the east to the west of the island. It is patrolled by the United Nations Peace Keeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) and guarded on each side by Turkish- and Greek-Cypriot troops, respectively. The Green Line features roadblocks, checkpoints, fortified houses,

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and sandbags. From 1974 to 2003, direct contact between the two sides was almost impossible. It was only in 2003 just before Cyprus’ accession to the EU that travel restrictions were partially lifted. Nicosia, the last divided city in Europe, became the main contact point between the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot communities. Despite the partial lifting of restrictions in movement across the line, traumatic stories of pain and loss persist across the divide, which makes the task of offering an impartial overview of the socio-political and cultural histories of the last two hundred years that have shaped the Cyprus problem almost impossible. As Moira Killoran points out, “just about every event, or denial of some activity as an event (a non-event), is contested in various accounts of Cypriot history.”8 This exact impossibility was a major challenge for this edited volume too, as it poses a fundamental question on the ways in which these multiple socio-political and cultural histories, as well as the ideological frameworks of Cypriot communities, have shaped art production on the island over the last century. However, it was not the complexity of this framework alone that deemed this volume necessary. It was also the lack of adequate historiographical records and critical analysis of artistic practice on the island, especially in relation to forces external to the Cyprus problem, such as travel, cultural exchange, studying abroad, questions of gender and identity, the activity of local subcultures, and the more recent formation of virtual artistic communities. The book’s aim has been, from the outset, to fill this gap in the literature and to create the foundations for further critical debate by drawing upon the various threads that might begin to map out the idiosyncrasies of an artistic practice that is as much local as it is global. More specifically, the chapters in this volume touch upon four interrelated themes: history, identities, place, and politics.

Shaping an Art Scene The island’s troubled history has had a profound impact on the construction of Cypriot identities; this is true of ethnic, gender, or artistic communities in equal measure. The chapters in the first section utilize methodological tools shaped by visual culture and practice-based research9 as a reflective approach toward the conflicted histories of the island and the ways these have shaped the development of an art scene. These also demonstrate a clear influence by the wider shifting of how art history is currently practiced and written beyond and outside of the Western canon,10 and which challenges assumptions of peripheral positioning. Stuart Hall argues that the grand narrative of Western modernity is increasingly understood as functioning next to many other narratives,11 while Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar urges us to consider the hybrid configurations of modernity that could ultimately destabilize “universalist idioms, historicize the contexts, and pluralize the experiences of modernity.”12 The chapters in this first section directly respond to these debates by presenting an art scene that, while shaped at the edges of empires—on the extreme south-east of the European Union, is also in tandem with modernization, cosmopolitanism, globalization, and digital connectivities.

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Louli Michaelidou’s chapter argues that the island’s post-independence period is framed by vigorous and intense modernization and characterized by nationalism whose dominance and resilience formed the essence of the cultural roots of Cyprus. Greek-Cypriot identity in particular has been fundamentally informed by three broader, interrelated ideological discourses—Hellenocentrism, Eurocentrism, and Western hegemony—manifesting themselves through recurrent themes. For Michaelidou, if art history and art criticism are to offer a positive contribution to contemporary art discourses and culture in Cyprus, then they need to engage in the critical and theoretical discourses pertaining to colonial and postcolonial modernity and the Cyprus problem in particular. The responsibility that contemporary historiographic and theoretical sensibilities bring to peripheral sites in particular is then to consider the “deflection” of history to culture, and the necessity to shift the central focus from historical context to the culturaland socio-political conditions in which art or art-writing is produced. Moreover, the paradoxical and non-linear tensions of dichotomies such as the national-international, the traditional-modern, the East-West, and the local-global13 become the key features of Cypriot postcolonial modernity and art, and are important in better understanding contemporary artistic practice and its desire to overcome the above tensions. Esra Plumer Bardak’s contribution approaches issues similar to Michaelidou’s, but bringing to the fore the Turkish-Cypriot community’s view. In her chapter, she identifies that the artistic activities of this small community, comparable in population to Iceland, can be observed in alternative forms of documentation that are fragmentary and multivocal, maintained as a way of adapting to an environment that has been fragmentary in itself and therefore lacked the mechanisms that traditionally carry the role of forming monovocal canonical narratives of art history. Fragmented records of contemporary practices have helped form a collection of petit récits, or little narratives, that emphasize localized stories without forming a centripetal narrative of Turkish-Cypriot art. Plumer Bardak highlights the lack of metanarratives and presents the fragmented history of contemporary practices that was formed under the guise of dialogue in alternative forms of documentation, namely, mass-media organs and reportage in the form of local art and cultural television programs, local newspapers, periodicals, and art magazines. Meanwhile, Greek-Cypriot art practice and historiography have also been weakly documented, the effort starting to take shape through the transition of the island into modernity, as the British Empire took administrative control in the late nineteenth century.14 The development of exhibition-making histories, and a linked—yet limited— documentation through catalogues and newspaper articles, was made possible by the creation of Victoria’s Museum—what is now the Cyprus Archaeological Museum—in the early twentieth century. It was steeped in colonial narratives. This then evolved into the first visual art exhibitions of the 1920s and 1930s in which professionally trained Cypriot and British visual artists, as well as amateurs took part,15 the Apophasis Gallery in the 1960s (discussed in the second section of the book), Cyprus’ participation in the Venice Biennial (1968), to the more contemporary manifestations of art practice, artist-run spaces, art programs, travel, exchange, artistic collaborations, and a plethora

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of parallel texts produced in the form of artist statements, interviews, positions, and short newspaper articles. Niki Zanti engages with these pertinent issues, arguing that artistic production in Cyprus has had to adapt to a changing environment, as well as conditions created by British colonial rule, the country’s independence, the events of 1974, EU accession (2004), and the economic crisis (early 2000s till today). Zanti outlines several noteworthy developments in the visual arts, from the establishment of formal degrees in the fields of fine art and art history in public and private universities, to the formation of artist-led spaces, museums inaugurated by collectors and the advocacy and action of artist associations. Within this framework, contemporary artists in Greek-speaking Cyprus seek the confirmation and validation of their artist-identity through the intricate structure of what defines an art system. By drawing our attention to the artistic ecosystem, Niki Zanti underlines how the professional life of artists is shaped by wider cultural production support mechanisms in the form of artist associations, galleries, cultural foundations, curators, and art research and writing. Moreover, she puts forward the perspective of the artist who works in the “periphery,” and how that might shape the artist’s identity. Marina Kassianidou’s text comes as an answer to the above question. Writing from her position as an artist and drawing from her own practice, she further highlights how Cypriot contemporary artists navigate through the local and global ecosystems of contemporary art through a personal and critical reflection. Kassianidou considers her itinerant practice within the context of her position as an artist from the “periphery.” She discusses both the necessity of traveling and of participating in artist residencies and the impact this mode of working has had on her own artistic process. She explores how moving and temporarily working within a variety of spaces eventually became an integral part of her practice, enabling her to construct a trajectory of interconnected spaces. Kassianidou shows how occupying both a peripheral and peripatetic position can generate a practice that is attentive to one’s own surroundings, while conceptualizing space—any kind of space—as non-blank and non-neutral, that is, as non-“peripheral.” In effect, in Kassianidou’s artistic practice and text, the dichotomies that have historically posed challenges to our understanding of art from Cyprus seem to collapse into the same continuum, where end and beginning are identical: a Mobius strip. The notion of the global collapses into locality, whereas manifestations of locality become interchangeable with those influences from the global in traveling, art-making, and exhibition display, as well as in processes of identity formation. Drawing from and building upon these ideas, the following section engages with and challenges different identities—gender, national, or artistic—as contested, malleable, shaping, and, in Judith Butler’s terms, also performative.16

Challenging Identities In discussing the notion of identity in Cypriot contemporary art, one needs to consider the ways in which the island has assimilated European modernity and other

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Contemporary Art from Cyprus

global trends with its own postcolonial context. In the tensions produced between different historical records and times, cultures, languages, knowledge-systems, and sense of belonging, identities can only be viewed as hybrid and multiple. Nikos Papastergiadis asks: is every cross-cultural encounter predetermined by a power differential and embedded cultural values, or does the aesthetic encounter with difference generate an alternate worldview?17 There are those who support the view that hybridity provides a positive and constructive aspect to artistic production,18 contrary to those who advocate a more pessimistic view of such exchanges.19 In the chapters of this section, artistic identities are further negotiated as hybrid, never singular or static. They are approached as the result of the socio-political landscape, of artist partnerships and collaborations, and in relation to wider gender politics and subcultural trends. Yiannis Toumazis explores how artistic identity might have been formed due to such positive and constructive artistic exchanges. He discusses the forgotten partnership between the British artist Glyn Hughes and the Cypriot artist Christoforos Savvas in the early years of the Republic of Cyprus, through primary material and information on the synergy of the two artists, derived mainly from Hughes’ written narratives. Through these writings, Apophasis Gallery, set up by the two artists, and the gallery’s operations are considered. Apophasis Gallery was unique not only because it was the first artist-run space in Cyprus, but also because it was a non-profit institution—a radical and pioneering setup, even considering the international circumstances of the time—that contributed to the formation of a new perception of art in Cyprus in the 1950s. The gallery became an artistic hub with a dynamic presence; beyond exhibitions, other important cultural events were also held there: lectures, discussions, theatre performances, and literary and musical presentations. What Hughes’ archive of writing reveals is that, during the short-lived dawn of the Republic of Cyprus, their collaboration set the foundations for the development of what can now be interpreted as the contemporary Cypriot art system. It also stands as an example of how artistic partnerships, artist-led spaces, artist collaborations and associations can affect, as much as support the production of art and artists’ sense of identity. In these two artists’ close partnership, one can witness what Gayatri Spivak described as an alternative modality of co-existence and mutual understanding that occurs when there is a degree of openness to learning from one another, while the ethical register of other cultural systems is directly addressed.20 Christoforos Savvas entered the historical record and was considered until very recently as one of the “fathers” of modern art from Cyprus. Glyn Hughes’ absence from the local art-historical canon reveals the many more who have remained in the margins, because of their “incompatibility” with the orthodox art-historical narrative: foreigners and women are among them. Women’s artistic production, in particular, provides a further example of unequal power relations; women’s works of art often tried to challenge such imbalances through reclaiming their subjectivities, agencies, and bodies.21 Exploring these women’s artistic interventions in relation to their experiences and gendered encounters that affected their personal life and professional career is essential in highlighting a need for further and more in-depth investigation of those conditions that have engendered women artists from Cyprus to claim professional

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7

status and to produce art against all odds while living in a patriarchal, nationalist, and military country. Maria Photiou—contrary to the majority of Greek-Cypriot art historians who until very recently privileged the “fathers” of Cypriot art—offers a crucial reflection on specific histories of Greek-Cypriot women artists, as well as on queer subcultures in contemporary Cypriot art. Starting from such pioneer women artists in Cyprus as Loukia Nicolaidou in the 1930s and Rhea Bailey in the 1970s, Photiou examines the possibilities, challenges, and ways in which these artists responded to their sociocultural milieu. Photiou also brings into focus the work of women’s collectives, for example, the Washing-Up Ladies formed by artists Lia Lapithi and Marianna Kafaridou who came together in 2007 to form a feminist artistic act that addressed gender discrimination and often-neglected feminist issues in Cyprus. Certainly, more research is needed about women artists from all ethnic communities on the island, as well as about their possible interactions and transcultural exchanges. As Marsha Meskimmon argues, it is in and through difference that we are offered new and exciting possibilities in terms of communicating with others and creating the “space in which to imagine ourselves and others as fellow wayfarers.”22 Meanwhile, Photiou’s chapter optimistically charts a new art history in the making, which offers the possibility to articulate women’s conditions and negotiations as artists in Cyprus. Issues relevant to history-making in and from the margins are further discussed in Marilena Zackheos’ and Nicos Philippou’s chapter, which shifts our attention to contemporary artistic subcultures in Nicosia. In presenting the emergence of a queer art subculture that challenges heteronormativity, transgresses strict social boundaries, and acknowledges queer lives, outlooks, and struggles, the chapter further contributes to the notion of fluid and hybrid identities. The authors present artistic and curatorial cases, highlighting the ways in which these have used the divided space in Nicosia— Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio (2009), Re Aphrodite’s At Maroudia’s (2012), Despina Michaelidou’s participation in Urban Drag and Small Homelands (2014), and Paola Revenioti’s Correction (2014 and 2015). The chapter enables the first ever archiving of the queer art subculture scene in Cyprus and the ways it orientates itself sexually and spatially, with artistic output that is interlaced with narratives of gender and feminism, as well as with questions about cultural orientation and nationalism. The small, yet cosmopolitan, politically charged space of the city, whilst not producing as radically explicit queer projects as abroad, allows for a dialogue with practices elsewhere and shapes opportunities of crossing boundaries and emphasizing fluidity rather than fixity of identity. This idea of a location—topos—that creates the conditions for negotiating, forming, and challenging identities is further explored in the third section of the book. While topos is used as a literary trope in the English language, topos (τόπος) in Greek retains its spatial resonance. It means place, an actual physical location that one can belong to, and links etymologically with topio, the Greek word for “landscape.”23 The chapters of the third section attempt to further engage with the notion of landscape and topos by looking at “excavation” in contemporary art, both literally as an actual practice and metaphorically as the process of unearthing questions about cultural identity, issues relating to the material past, and the politics of archaeology in Cyprus.

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Contemporary Art from Cyprus

Excavating Place Landscape has been central to art-historical discourses since the inception of the discipline and has often been promoted as a “pure” and “Western”24 invention, coinciding with the rise of capitalism and imperialism. But the purity of landscape has since been challenged, and its contingent and constructed nature highlighted,25 especially in relation to national identities and conflicts.26 Landscape has come to be seen instead as an “instrument of cultural power” that “circulates as a medium of exchange, a site of visual appropriation, a focus for the formation of identity.”27 Elena Parpa’s chapter explores the overlapping concepts of topos, identity, and culture in artistic production beginning with a cluster of neighboring villages in the outskirts of Nicosia as a zone of contact and a space of encounter between artists who are historically and conceptually distant. The chapter brings together one of the most important figures of Cypriot art, Adamantios Diamantis (1900–94), with contemporary artists Haris Epaminoda, Stelios Kallinikou, Angelos Makrides, Mustafa Hulusi, and the artists group Neoterismoi Toumazou. In so doing, it underlines the enduring interest, despite important shifts in perception, in staking out the topos of identity and culture as the two concepts connect across landscapes to mutually shape each other. To highlight this ongoing preoccupation is to acknowledge that the politics of cultural identity have yet to disappear. As Papastergiadis notes, under the pressure of globalization and acculturation, cultural identity has shown unexpected resilience. “To find a place to speak from but also one that speaks to and of you” thus remains an important contention, one that requires knowledge of culture.28 Through the critical appraisal of artworks executed across different timeframes, socio-political conditions, and artistic media, Parpa argues that what has changed are the terms with which we ask the same questions: Where should we look for a sense of self? How do we trace and construct a shape out of what we observe, and how do we communicate it? Such questions of tracing are reenacted in a discussion exploring contemporary art and archaeology in Cyprus that was first put together by Elena Parpa, Gabriel Koureas, and Christina Lambrou at the British Museum in September 2016. Artists Alev Adil, Haris Epaminonda, Maria Loizidou, and Christodoulos Panayiotou were invited to participate in The Ground Beneath Our Feet, a dialogue that was itself conceived with the intention of exploring the way archaeology—as a science, a metaphor, and a thinking process—crosses paths with artistic practice in Cyprus. The discussion carried on after the event’s conclusion, and in this book it takes the shape of a scripted dialogue and a further dialectical exchange, which reflects and explores the parallels and overlaps that emerged at the British Museum. This process—exploring the poetic potential of the fragment—also reveals further narratives to consider, such as the dynamics that both define the conversation between art and archaeology and unsettle the neat boundaries that distinguish each discipline, the conceptualization of archaeology as metaphor in artistic practice, and the object-ness of things. Elena Stylianou and Artemis Eleftheriadou further explore the relationship between archaeology and contemporary art. Their chapter investigates how notions of transformation, rupture, historical discontinuity, and multiplicity in the

Introduction

9

archaeological, as well as the idea of the archive as a dynamic set of relations (rather than documents and/or objects) relate to contemporary art. Beginning from a close historical investigation of the relationship between art and archaeology, with a focus on Cyprus, the chapter explores the work of three contemporary Greek-Cypriot artists who have adopted archaeology as a methodological approach: Elizabeth HoakDoering, Socratis Socratous, and Savvas Christodoulides. These artists challenge institutional and discursive boundaries in an attempt to provide alternative readings or new interpretive approaches to the orthodox historical understanding and perception of time and narration. Looking at the past through objects and offering alternative socio-political understandings of the present only further affirm the fluidity of those notions of historicity, identity, and memory. In our era, manifestations of virtuality offer new ways of understanding connectivity and communication in daily life, of imagining and transforming conventional viewpoints and ideas about space and the body, and of expanding art practices or even “de-categorizing” them.29 Hence our relationship to materiality has gained increased significance.30 As theorists Anthony Bryant and Griselda Pollock argue, “[b]ehind the surface of virtual worlds, lie still very concrete processes of material production, labour, capital, and work by grounded beings in space and time.”31 Our relation to our material past, our cultures, places, and historical moments, as charted in various chapters of this collection, determines identity as neither apolitical nor fixed in place and time. Instead, notions of diverse multiplicities, of fluid historicity, and of shifting identities are inextricably linked to the political, which is what the last section of the book aims to explore. The chapters engage more directly with the complex sociopolitical conditions of the island and discuss artworks that offer an alternative reading and response, especially to conflict and borders in Cyprus.

Negotiating Politics Contemporary parallel local and global living involves the assimilation of an everincreasing pace of life and information, and raises inevitable questions concerning the concept of identity and the relationship between body, place, bios, politics, and memory. This is especially true in a place famed for its ongoing political problem, which has been branded as the Cyprus Problem and is materialized in the no-man’s land which is home to and patrolled by the UNFICYP. Social anthropologist Yael Navaro-Yashin describes the heavily armed border areas in detail and describes how the country is filled with nationalist slogans “decorating” hills, slopes, and mountaintops: “Soldiers are everywhere, either in person or through their symbols: khaki-coloured military cars; red-and-white barrels marking off access zones; guns, rifles and uniforms.”32 Gabriel Koureas’ essay shifts our focus to one such emblematic remnant of conflict on the island—the town of Famagusta—and reads what is known as the “ghost city” of Varosha by adopting a transcultural memory approach. The essay discusses modern and contemporary visual artworks and Cypriot art history in order to reveal the instances of amnesia and selective remembering in art-historical writings and

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Contemporary Art from Cyprus

how contemporary Cypriot artists challenge this. Artists such as Klitsa Antoniou, Lia Lapithi, Özge Ertanin, Katerina Attalidou, and the architectural project Hands on Famagusta use transmedial work, which is characterized by the re-mediation of photography, the personal, and the archival, to question current nationalist trends and conflicts not only in Cyprus, but also more widely across the Middle East. The works discussed here offer a deeper understanding of the complex political and socio-cultural conditions that provide a much-needed understanding of the multiple and complex layers of memory, both personal and cultural that inform the histories of the country.33 Similar issues of spatiality, identity, history, and memory are the main preoccupation of Basak Senova’s chapter. Written from a curator’s perspective, this essay discusses UNCOVERED: Nicosia International Airport, the project Senova co-curated with Pavlina Paraskevaidou. The project focused on the defunct Nicosia International Airport, which is situated in the Buffer Zone, as a site for investigating the mechanisms of control at work on the island alongside notions of commons. Senova also engages with Confrontation through Art, a project that took place between 2015 and 2016 in Nicosia. Through a comparative reading of these two artistic activities and an activist intervention, Occupy the Buffer Zone, she presents an assessment of the significance of the contested areas of the Nicosia Buffer Zone used by the projects and considers how such projects are received by the public in Cyprus. In such a context—the most south-eastern point of the European Union—the relationship of art and politics is interpreted through lenses that attest to a political use of art to both build an ethno-national identity and transform divisions, as well as facilitate shared spaces and contact zones. Jacques Rancière, writing on politics and aesthetics, indicates that since the turn of the twenty-first century, “there has been increasingly frequent talk of arts having returned to politics.”34 Claire Bishop, drawing from Rancière, terms social and political contemporary art practices as the ethical turn, observing it in advocates of socially collaborative art and seeing it reflected and shaped by discourses that prevailed during the 1990s in relation to difference, otherness, and identity.35 For Rancière, “the ethical turn would mean today that there is an increasing tendency to submit politics and art to moral judgments about the validity of their principles and the consequences of their practices.”36 One cannot but trace an overarching influence of this ethical reading of art, as art’s need to be useful, ethically responsible and a tool in the fight for human and ecological rights. The coining of the phrase “human rights” in the 1940s, which culminated in the creation of the United Nations (UN), and its subsequent evolution in the latter part of the twentieth century came to be a widely influential terminology by the 1990s.37 The UN—as an intergovernmental human rights organization—is an entity strongly questioned and reflected upon both in the artwork that is on the cover of this book (Johnathan Cook, fUN, 2013) and in the final section of the book. The role of international human rights and developmental aid programs is highlighted in the last chapter by Evanthia Tselika. Artistic practices that have been used in the context of the ethno-nationally divided city of Nicosia as a tool for conflict transformation are read here in relation to the global discussion on socially engaged and politically reflective art practices. By considering the phenomenon of socially engaged

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practices in line with conflict transformation as a sector that has been increasingly including community outreach artistic programs, global political mechanisms and their outreach into the arts become evident. The chapter discusses four projects that demonstrate the interlaced local and global dimension of the use of art, funded by international developmental programs, as a tool of both social engagement and conflict transformation. This is clear when we consider that Off Limits (1992) was instigated in London, the Gotland Art Meeting (1999) took place in Sweden, and Leaps of Faith (2005) and Manifesta 6 (2006) involved and were widely shaped through international participation.

Conclusion The book initiates a much-needed local and global conversation around visual cultures and art histories using Cyprus as a case study. The discussion is not shaped as an exhaustive historiographic mapping of contemporary art practices from the island; instead, it draws deliberate examples from various art practices, practitioners, methodologies, and art historians. This approach enhances and supports the essential notion of fragmentation in historical representation, the acknowledgment of the impossibility of a complete authoring of art historiography, and the desire to include and unearth gaps, inconsistencies, absences, returns, and departures38 as a critical approach toward issues that are crucial and relevant not only to Cyprus, but also to other places around the world. Several issues unfold across the chapters of this book relating to the particular tensions between forces that are both external as much as they are internal to a place, and which contribute to the shaping of a local art scene, of diverse and fluid identities, of historicity, politics, cultures, and memory. In its distinct investigations of contemporary art practices from Cyprus, the book remains a testament to many challenges similar to those identified by theorist Sharon MacDonald in anthropology’s attempts at telling the past.39 These challenges emerge because of the multidirectional and multitemporal relationships between the past and the present, due to the veracity of “different historical tellings,” or in the attempt to find “ways of hearing ‘quiet voices’, that is, accounts that do not readily become part of the wider public sphere.”40 What should become apparent however, from the essays that follow, is that artists from Cyprus—from both sides of the divide—share similar critical positions and ask similar questions rather than provide overarching statements, thus offering reflection and challenging hegemonic narratives. They do so through transcultural exchanges, collaborations, travel, and reflective dialogues that provide the foundation for further interactions and negotiations in ways that are very similar to artists working elsewhere. Moreover, the book ultimately contributes to debates that negotiate the tensions between the global and the local, especially through the examples that acutely highlight the idea of the contemporary artist who is influenced by travel, artistic collaborations, institutions, and digital connectivities, among others. In our era of internet realities,41 where the local and global become convoluted across our many digital devices, Caren Kaplan’s acknowledgment that “conventions of locating identities and practices are

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Contemporary Art from Cyprus

shifting or destabilized” is made evident in the chapters of this edited book.42 This makes the task of drafting a single “portrait” of contemporary art from Cyprus even less feasible, enhancing instead the idea that we can only speak of multiples. And so, the book is not merely an acknowledgment of the impact of locality on artistic practice, but also aims to stand as evidence of the multiplicity of locality itself, that in effect forms both place and identity as heterogeneous, filled with gaps and inconsistencies. As we oscillate between our need for local historical reimagining and global positioning in the multilayered digital environment of our virtual realities, the contested borders that define the lived realities of the island become all the more embodied. The following collection of essays presents us with a first attempt to collectively and academically reflect on contemporary art production from Cyprus. As such, we hope to contribute to both a local and global discussion of art histories and visual cultures outside the centers of empire and the megacities of modern and contemporary art.

Notes 1

Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Dislocation in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Global Culture, ed. Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1990). 2 The first settlements in Cyprus arrived during the Neolithic period (8200 BC). Since then, numerous peoples have conquered and controlled the island: Greeks, Assyrians, Romans, Byzantines, Franks, Venetians, Ottomans, and the British. 3 Hubert Faustmann and Emilios Solomou, eds., Independent Cyprus 1960–2010. Selected Writings from the Cyprus Review (Nicosia: University of Nicosia, 2011), 11. See also Stavros Panteli, A History of Cyprus: From Foreign Domination to Troubled Independence (London: East-West Publications, 2011). 4 Rebecca Bryant, Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 3. 5 Bryant, Imagining the Modern, 2. 6 Susan Lisa Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media, and Colonial Counter-Insurgency, 1944–1960 (London and New York: Mansell, 1995); Bryant, Imagining the Modern. 7 Vangelis Calotychos, ed., Cyprus and Its People: Nation, Identity and Experience in an Unimaginable Community (1955–1997) (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1998); Yiannis Papadakis, Echoes from the Dead Zone (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005);Yael NavaroYashin, The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Post-war Polity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 8 Moira Killoran, “Time, Space and National Identities in Cyprus,” in StepMothertongue: From Nationalism to Multiculturalism, Literatures of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey, ed. Mehmet Yashin (London: Middlesex University Press, 2000), 133. 9 Rose Gillian, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (London: Sage, 2001). 10 Irit Rogoff, Terra: Infirma (New York: Routledge, 2000). 11 Stuart Hall, “Museums of Modern Art and the End of History,” in Annotations. 6, Modernity and Difference, ed. S. Campbell and G. Tawadros (London: Institute of International Visual Arts (InIVA), 2001).

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12 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar,“On Alternative Modernities,” in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 15. 13 Elena Stylianou and Nicos Philippou, “Greek-Cypriot Locality: (Re) Defining Our Understanding of European Modernity,” in A Companion to Modern Art, ed. Pam Meecham (Hoboken NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 339–58. 14 Bryant, Imagining the Modern. 15 Evanthia Tselika, Chrystalleni Loizidou, Christina Lambrou, Elena Parpa, and Maria Petrides, “Timeline of Exhibition Making in Cyprus,” in Other Indications (exhibition), Nicosia Municipal Art Centre (2013–14). https://reaphrodite.blogspot. com/2013/12/30-november-2013-evolving-timeline-of.html (accessed December 13, 2019). 16 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006). 17 Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 117. 18 Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (London: Routledge, 2001); Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004); Kobena Mercer, Cosmopolitan Modernisms, Annotating Art’s Histories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). For the Cypriot context, see Stephanos Stephanides and Stavros Stavrou Karayanni, eds., Vernacular Worlds, Cosmopolitan Imagination (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015). 19 Rasheed Araeen, “A New Beginning: Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics,” Third Text 14, no. 50 (2000): 3–20; Slavoj Žižek, Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism (London: New Left Review, 1997). 20 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York, Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2003), 33. For the specificity of Cypriot postcolonial context, see Spurgeon Thompson, Stavros St. Karayanni, and MyriaVassiliadou, “Cyprus after History,” Interventions 6, no. 2 (2004): 282–99. 21 Elizabeth. A. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Marsha Meskimmon, Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). For the Cypriot context, see Maria Hadjipavlou, Women and Change in Cyprus: Feminisms and Gender in Conflict (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010). 22 Meskimmon, Women Making Art, 93. 23 Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 18. 24 Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (Edinburgh: Pelican, 1956). 25 W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002); David Lowenthal, “Past Time, Present Place: Landscape and Memory,” Geographical Review 65 (1975): 1–36. 26 Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 27 Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 2. For a discussion on the relationship between photographic practices, landscape and identity, see Liz Wells, Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011).

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28 Nikos Papastergiadis, Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and the Everyday (Amsterdam: Polity Press, 2010), 45, 49. 29 Anthony Bryant and Griselda Pollock, “Editors’ Introduction,” in Digital and Other Virtualities: Renegotiating the image, ed. Anthony Bryant and Griselda Pollock (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 14. 30 Greg Hainge, “Art Matters: Philosophy, Art History and Art’s Material Presence,” Culture, Theory and Critique 57, no. 2 (2016): 137–41. A further example of the new materiality in contemporary philosophical thought is the work of political philosopher Jane Bennett, who in her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) argues for vital materialism, a concept according to which an object-thing has the power and capacity to act as an affective agent. 31 Bryant and Pollock, Digital and Other Virtualities, 14. 32 Yael Navaro-Yashin, “De-Ethnicizing the Ethnography of Cyprus: Political and Social Conflict between Turkish-Cypriots and Settlers from Turkey,” in Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History and an Island in Conflict, ed. Yiannis Papadakis, Nicos Peristianis, and Griselda Welz (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 89. 33 For memory cultures in the Cypriot context, see Stephanos Stephanides, ed., Cultures of Memory, Memories of Culture (Nicosia: University of Nicosia Press, 2007). 34 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. S. Corcoran (London and New York: Continuum Books, 2010), 135. 35 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso Books, 2012), 25. 36 Rancière, Dissensus, 135. 37 Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights: Critical Thought at the Turn of the Century (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000). 38 For a relevant discussion on the ways history might be conceptualized in relation to locality, see Paola Filippucci’s essay “A French Place without a Cheese: Problems with Heritage and Identity in Northeastern France,” Focaal-European Journal of Anthropology 44 (2004): 72–86. 39 Sharon MacDonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2013). 40 MacDonald, Memorylands, 52. 41 James Bridle, New Dark Age. Technology and the End of the Future (London: Verso, 2018). 42 Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 26.

Part One

Shaping an Art Scene

16

1

Art History as Narration: Ideological Configurations of Greek-Cypriot Modernity in Art Louli Michaelidou

In the fifty-year span from the late sixties to present day, postcolonial Cyprus has undergone a vigorous and intense modernization process, which has coincided with its tumultuous efforts toward liberal democracy. An extensive body of mainly socialanthropological research on postcolonial Cyprus, developed over recent decades, has demonstrated the profound impact of nationalism on the modern history of Cyprus, an ideology whose dominance and resilience throughout and beyond modernity lie in its cultural roots. The relevant sociohistorical assessment conducted in the framework of this research has indicated that the construction of the Greek-Cypriot identity in particular has been fundamentally informed by three broader, interrelated ideological discourses—Hellenocentrism, Eurocentrism, and Western hegemony—manifesting themselves through recurrent themes. These discourses have synthesized what has been described as a condition of “symbolic domination” of the mind, which has consistently prevented Cypriots from reflecting on their own colonial and postcolonial condition. A first-level examination of historiographic literature on Cypriot art attempted through this study1 suggested that the latter has almost invariably reflected the ideological conceptions of the Greek-Cypriot national and cultural identity that govern the broader Greek-Cypriot political and social sphere. Furthermore, an inquiry into existing critical approaches to art history internationally, referencing a global comparative study by James Elkins2 in particular, showed that the Cypriot case does not escape the Western ideological configurations of modern art history and aesthetics, adopted by both the West and the non-West. This phenomenon drew attention to the need for a re-conceptualization of Cyprus’ artistic modernity, not as an aspiring by-product of the Western art canon, but as a distinct chapter in a world history of alternative modernities. In his introduction to Cosmopolitan Modernisms—a volume of essays investigating the broad historical period in which modernist attitudes took shape in national and cultural environments around the world—Kobena Mercer3 joins critics who argue that art history from the nineteenth century onwards has been predominantly

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Contemporary Art from Cyprus

Eurocentric, revolving mainly around Western artists and institutions. Stuart Hall also attacked the idea that modernism is the exclusive property of the West, while stressing the importance of acknowledging the existence of a diversity of modernisms, and translating them in cultural and political terms: The world is absolutely littered by modernities and by practicing artists, who never regarded modernism as the secure possession of the West, but perceived it as a language which was both open to them but which they would have to transform. The history therefore should now be rewritten as a set of cultural translations rather than as a universal movement, which can be located securely within a culture, within a history, within a space, within a chronology and within a set of political and cultural relations.4

As a theorist preoccupied with the dialectics of culture and difference, Hall contested the enduring practice of taking Western canon as the sole valid form of reference for the writing of history, and art history in particular, in non-Western settings. What he was advocating was that the history of modernity and modernism cannot be viewed as uniform and singular, but instead as referring to multiple histories and geographical spaces, a whole “series of fluid, heterogeneous cultural formations, or ‘cultural translations’.”5 These histories, in turn, are narratives, discursively imposing certain meanings and structures that are not-so-conveniently produced in the real world, so that instead of a history of art, we should be talking “about how we have chosen to narrate the identity of the histories of art to ourselves.”6 What is of primary interest here is not so much the tendency of Western art historians to treat art history as a single enterprise, but how local art historiography, while proclaiming its particularity, strives to fit the Western norm based on a preexisting set of arguments. Writing on Cypriot art is limited. It might be accurate to say that we have yet to see a comprehensive history of Cypriot art, at least not one produced through methodical and sustained research, or the engagement of theoretical and critical perspectives.7 Texts that attempt a comprehensive historical approach are dispersed: they appear most often in the introductory sections of exhibition catalogues on Cypriot art, or else in monographs or anthologies on local artists, who are usually grouped generationally. What these texts—authored from the eighties onward—form is a documentary literature of Cypriot art in the twentieth century, mainly concentrating on the activity of artists in the decades prior to and following the Republic’s independence in 1960. They are typically limited to biographical facts, references to the patterns that may be observed in relation to the form and content of artistic production, and occasionally some surface commentary on the social and political conditions of the period being discussed. Significantly, they also attempt to place the artists they are addressing in a Western art-historical cannon. This section is not a comprehensive review of the literature on Cypriot art, but rather an illustrative overview of the initial attempts to provide a “compressed” history of Cypriot art in the twentieth century, which—for reasons that will be explained— have come, or have aspired to be seen as exemplary. Furthermore, this overview is not exhaustive, but instead concentrates on specific, recurrent themes that relate to

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the subject under study. Focusing on the ideological effects of discursive practice, the obvious methodological choice here was to take a discourse analytic approach to excerpts from prevailing local publications that featured these early writings, and others that followed in the same vein. Writers8 note that Cypriot art, in the modern sense of the word, begins in the late nineteenth century; prior to this, art was either of the ecclesiastic (Byzantine) or folk variety. Any artwork produced during the island’s medieval period, when local nobility maintained ties with important centers in France and Italy, is thought to have been destroyed or stolen, in the course of successive invasions and lootings. Cypriot art—due to the “strategic geographic position”9 of the island between East and West—is seen as simultaneously unique and particular, adapting forms from diverse cultures and regions,10 but also suffering under the tyranny of foreign conquerors. The Ottoman rule that came next is described by many Greek-Cypriot authors as a dark age, where artistic and cultural creativity among the locals was vehemently suppressed.11 What is referred to as “secular art”12 developed during the time of British rule (1878–1959). In the absence of art schools on the island throughout the first half of the twentieth century,13 Greek-Cypriot14 artists started to train abroad, most commonly in Greece, Great Britain, and France. What is generally observed by historians in these artists’ work is a personal interpretation of formal knowledge, a mixture of references and a multiplicity of styles and directions. In these texts,15 it is often stressed that artists return from their studies to find an environment of isolation, devoid of critical discourse—in the artistic domain and beyond—and suffering from a multitude of ever-worsening internal complexities.16 This has been used to explain their late adoption of and adherence to elements characteristic of early Western modernist movements such as impressionism, symbolism, fauvism, expressionism, and cubism up to and beyond the first half of the twentieth century, as well as the late appearance of surrealist, abstract expressionist and pop art influences in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Furthermore, these temporally displaced styles of the Western avant-garde are seen as being transferred outside their “original” ideological, theoretical, and social context, and in effect surviving on the island through their formal and aesthetic qualities,17 a phenomenon that is nevertheless not extensively addressed. Nonetheless, the work of locally established Cypriot artists has been consistently compared to major figures in European modernism.18 Another common observation underlines the significant impact of the earlier generations of Cypriot artists on the gradual increase in awareness of locals around art. Despite the social pressures and thorny political conditions forcing many artists to live in poverty or as refugees, they nevertheless strived to introduce to an unheeding, conservative audience the existence of a creative universe beyond the commonplace and the mundane.19 Major periods and events in Cypriot history or even prehistory— seen as directly affecting the development of art on the island over the course of the last century—almost invariably form a backdrop for these accounts; these events are viewed both as an inspiration and as an impairment that prevented Cypriot people from reaching their “full potential.” The events in 1974, in particular, are thought to have caused a shift to more realistic, representational, and symbolic themes with

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Contemporary Art from Cyprus

“pananthropic dimensions,” in an effort to project national identity against the “dangers of national annihilation,”20 in “one of the most fate-torn areas of the world.”21 Some writers, like Eleni Nikita22 and Chrysanthos Christou23—two figures traditionally associated with Cypriot art history—acknowledge the problems and weaknesses in existing historiography and research;24 they point to the scarcity of documentation on activity carried out in recent decades, the lack of monographs and essays on artists and trends, as well as the absence of an important art museum. Precisely because of these circumstances, the contributions of existing texts acquire more gravity. But as these texts constitute the near totality of attempts to historically review Cypriot art—and are often imbued with the authority of official positions and publications—it would make sense to presume that they have influenced subsequent writings, as well as the broader public perception around the subject. In addition, as their content remains—for the most part—critically unchallenged, it would be useful to examine their prevailing narratives; that is, going back to Hall, to ascertain which identity of the Cypriot history of art they—consciously or unconsciously—choose to narrate, and whether that notion of identity expresses the dominant cultural, political, and social views among Greek-Cypriots in the post-independence period, particularly after 1974. The story of Cypriot art usually begins with the idea of its geopolitical position being both a blessing and a curse.

Crossroads of East and West Being a crossroads of peoples and civilisations, ancient Cyprus produced an art which emanated from a free and creative synthesis of elements of eastern and western civilisations. […] Unfortunately, however, Cyprus was not to enjoy long periods of peace, political stability and economic well-being, essential prerequisites for the development, flowering and consolidation of indigenous artistic creation, because her important geopolitical position made her the prey of those who wielded power at different periods.25 … the positive effects that the geopolitical position of Cyprus exerted on the development of its art had also negative effects as the island became a prey to neigbouring peoples and thus the island had not experienced long periods of peace, stability and economic prosperity.26

This notion of Cyprus as being an attractive and strategic center, and thus the victim27 of various foreign powers who aimed to control the region, is one of the most common references in Cyprus history books and art texts, to the extent that it has become a deeply embedded and enduring local perception. Conducting research on society and the economy in eighteenth-century Ottoman Cyprus, Antonis Hadjikyriacou28 notes that this exaggerated account of the island’s strategic importance—also found in other island societies—is a “… point of convergence between the two competing nationalist historiographies of Cyprus,” which a more thorough examination proves to be an “ahistorical” myth, “taken as truism for all historical periods”; not only does this myth fail to consider the ever-changing

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economic, diplomatic, military, and other conditions on the island over time, it also allows for comfortably fatalistic views that consistently attribute the islanders’ fate to factors outside of themselves.29 A number of other themes and narratives emerge from these illustrative texts.

Eurocentrism and Reification of the West It was only after the founding of the Cyprus Republic in 1960 that the spirit of modernism—as a spirit of artistic quest, breaking with tradition and aiming at renewal—came to Cyprus, reducing gradually the great distance which separated Cypriot art with what was happening internationally. Today a large number of artists carry out their quests in the contemporary artistic spirit. These special characteristics of the course of Cypriot art of the 20th century and the latent embracing of the values of modernism impelled us to make no mention at all of the term “modern art” and to adopt the term “contemporary art,” a term by which we mean all the forms of secular artistic creation which developed in Cyprus from the first decades of the 20th century up to the present time.30

The notion of deprivation due to isolation and remoteness from the Western centers of art is recurrent: In Europe and America, the end of the 19th century determined the many complex artistic trends art would follow, but Cyprus remained in a state of inertia, cut off from the main body of art where the major events were taking place.31 For many decades the discussion revolved around the so-called art of the periphery. The term posed questions around the questionable or almost nonexistent cultural exchange of the metropolitan centres with provincial areas. The questions were certainly not answered and today, in times of globalisation, they are extinct. Every geographical exclusion produces an exclusion of values, and consequently also of the values of art.32

The kinship felt by Cypriot artists to European modernism is another common feature: These trends (of abstraction) in Cypriot art during the ’60s which coexisted with the older achievements (Malevic, constructivism, neoplasticism, Bauhaus), and also with more recent quests like optical art and the achievements of English modernism, were not at all foreign to ancient Greek philosophical thought and particularly to Plato’s ideas on art. For this reason Cypriot artists, who also embraced them, quickly felt a community in spirit with them, which helped them in their swift fertilisation and their personal development.33 The general characteristic of all these endeavours, whether in painting or in sculpture, was the search for harmony, measure (metron) and poetic balance between the various elements. Even in its more extreme forms, the abstract art that developed in Cyprus after the end of the ’50s and up to 1974 never turned into an

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Contemporary Art from Cyprus empty gesture. Having been nearer to the European philosophical conception of the non-figurative and to local tradition, it always remained a bearer of messages.34

These statements make a number of explicit claims. First, that up to its independence, a traditional Cyprus existed—outside the world of progress and modernization— isolated from Western values, and therefore culturally deprived. Second, that this deprivation hindered the proper development of Cypriot art, and since the latter does not fit into the Western modernist norm, it consequently cannot be called “modern”; that said, the author considers “contemporary” to paradoxically be a more suitable term for the art of the entire twentieth century. Third, that once the geographical isolation was overcome (i.e., through rightfully rejoining Europe and entering the era of globalization), Western artistic values became free-flowing, eradicating questions of art in relation to the center-periphery dynamic. Finally, that Cypriot artists are spiritually inspired through a reunion with the ideals of their ancient Greek heritage, which were also the foundations of Western modernism. Here, the West is essentialized as the only source of original culture, echoing Herzfeld’s35 analysis of the essentialist dichotomy of the world between modern (Western) and traditional (non-Western) societies, Fabian’s36 study of the anthropological paradigm whereby other societies are placed in a different temporal existence and denied cultural equality, as well as Jusdanis’37 assessment of belated or “incomplete” modernization in non-Western sites. Only, in this case, and as social anthropologist Vassos Argyrou has demonstrated, the Greek-Cypriot mind, having adopted the Eurocentric vision of the world, is turning these arguments against itself, its society—and in this case, its art. Vassos Argyrou’s research explores the ways in which Cypriots have become Western subjects, adding another layer to the already complex nexus of the colonial, but also the postcolonial condition. Even before the experience of British rule, he argues, a different kind of Western colonization took place in Cyprus, whose effects were much more subtle and effective than political or economic domination; he calls it “symbolic domination.”38 The term refers to a process whereby the West partly maintains its hegemony through others’ recognition of its superiority. In this context, Cypriots tied themselves to a particular identity that could only be fulfilled through the objectified, superior authority of the West. This, however, constitutes a symbolic and ultimately self-defeating struggle, as the West is not an identity or a destination to be reached, but “a historical construct that emerged within the context of colonialism and neo-colonialism as an instrument of division and power.”39 Assuming that modernization is a linear process that replaces tradition, rather than an uneven and disjunctive one that takes different forms within each society,40 these positions exemplify how Cypriots employ typically Western hegemonic strategies to symbolically deny themselves their own right to modernity. The “interruption” from the “natural” course of modernity and (Western) civilization is thought to be restored through the reunification and instant identification with the ideals of Western modernism, whose logical and aesthetic foundations lie in the ancient Greek ancestry of Cyprus. Not surprisingly, the main cause of this “interruption” is

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easily traced back to the Ottoman era (1571–1878), one that the Greek nationalist perception maintains is a historical anomaly, or an uncomfortable period whose adverse effects linger for the “indigenous” (referring to Christian or ethnic Greek) population. This notion of the Ottomans/Turks as the maligned “other” has been described thus: With the conquest of Cyprus by the Ottomans in 1571 the darkest period in the culture of the island began. The new conquerors were not in the least interested in the cultural level of Cypriots nor, during the three centuries of their rule, did they leave on the island a single creative piece of work. On the contrary, many notable monuments were allowed to fall into ruin because of neglect. Moreover, the prohibiting by the Muslim religion of the representation of figures did not permit the revival of the anthropocentric tradition of ancient Greece as happened in the West and was, in addition, a factor which delayed the spread of the ideas of Renaissance art to the island. The people during this period experienced the greatest economic misery in their history, which compelled them to devote all their efforts to their physical survival.41

Similar descriptions can be found in Christou’s Brief History of Modern and Contemporary Art:42 For more than three centuries, and more specifically since 1571, when Cyprus falls into the hands of the Turks43 and until the first decades of the twentieth century, we have nothing but uneven efforts to apply familiar and established Byzantine types, without fertile elements and possibilities for renewal.44

Another excerpt, from a catalogue text covering a century of Cypriot sculpture: One of the most important characteristics of sculpture is that it is linked to socioeconomic conditions, on which its development and physiognomy rely. […] It is therefore an art related to the present and its needs. Consequently, Cypriot sculpture during the period of Turkish domination became no more than a supplement to architecture—especially religious architecture—religious microsculpture and some forms of folk art, decorative or functional.45

Here, the negative references to Ottoman rule are in line with the typical narratives found in official Greek-Cypriot and Greek history books.46 Ottomans (sometimes called Turks)—the historical enemy of Hellenism—are synonymous to barbarism and an attitude of indifference or disrespect for culture; their Islamic “absolutism” is held responsible for depriving the island of its contact with Western movements and the Renaissance, which had been, in its turn, informed by the classical ideals of ancient Greece. Folk art, referring to indigenous Cypriot, peasant culture, often associated with common Byzantine styles, is referred to as the compromised alternative, which had no noteworthy results.47 These depictions in fact illustrate an exact transference to

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Cypriot art texts of the mainstream nationalist rhetoric regarding the “expansionist,” “polluting,” “uncivilized,” and “violent” Turk as the ultimate “imperfection” compared to the Hellenic image.48 It is worth mentioning that similar references are found in a publication on twentieth-century Cypriot art produced through a bicommunal initiative,49 suggesting how deeply this idea has come to be embedded, even in the more ideologically “moderate” mind: The Greek Cypriots managed to preserve their identity during the difficult time of the Franks, the Venetians and the Ottomans (12th–19th centuries), through profound conservatism, which had characterised them since Mycenaen times, despite the Latinisation efforts undertaken by the Franks and the violent Islamisation attempted by the Ottoman Empire. […] As the Ottomans applied Turco-Islamic plastic art norms, the new settlers of the island, who basically came from Middle Anatolia, showed no interest in the figurative plastic arts, unlike the Christians who did so by tradition. […] Therefore, unlike literature, it may be safely argued that Modern European art, i.e. painting or sculpture, as it is broadly understood, until the very end of the Ottoman rule did not attract the attention of Ottoman Cypriots.50

We come across the same ideas in the catalogue that references an exhibition organized in 2010 by the Cyprus Chamber of Fine Arts (E.KA.TE.), on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Cyprus Republic. E.KA.TE. has traditionally promoted rapprochement between the Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot artistic communities.51 The exhibition had been endorsed as one of the emblematic events of the official program of celebrations; on the political level therefore, it was particularly significant, if not essential, for it to include Turkish-Cypriot artists. Over the years, however, the official (Greek-Cypriot) efforts to promote the anniversary of independence as a celebration of all Cypriots had consistently failed to take into consideration that it actually signified very different things for Turkish-Cypriots.52 Notedly, the rhetoric of an event that was meant to be inclusive had not managed to divert from the prevailing Greek-Cypriot identity narrative.53 The following extract from the introductory text of the exhibition (authored by the E.KA.TE.-assigned Greek-Cypriot curator) shows an attempt to explain the ways in which the Ottoman “other” has failed to assimilate with the more Western, Greek-Cypriot identity, also highlighting the adverse consequences for art: The novel and greatly significant element in the country has been the arrival of the Ottomans who in contrast to their Western conquerors of Cyprus have been agents of diametrically different ways in almost all aspects of culture. This difference, reinforced by the political practices of the national movements of the beginning of the 19th century, has not yet been ironed out in order to achieve a new and harmonious synthesis.54

According to Hadjikyriacou,55 secondary sources on eighteenth-century Cyprus paint a grim picture of the social and economic conditions on the island, conveying a sense of corruption and decline. Although some evidence, such as administrative

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documentation, supports this view, recent critical historical research (hindered in the past by factors such as competing nationalisms and the language barrier) suggests that the actual conditions and dynamics at play were much more subtle and intricate, while also pointing to the socioeconomic system’s potential for self-sustainability. Hadjikyriacou points to an important interdisciplinary volume on Ottoman Cyprus56 produced through a collaboration of Cypriot and foreign scholars, which also covers disciplines like the history of art, folklore, and literature. In this work, the contributions of Kappler and Hadjikyriakos57 illustrate how Cypriots from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth continued to produce art and literature on the basis of the economic, social, cultural, and educational conditions of their micro-society; this production reflected a “characteristic sensitivity to external influences,” assimilating both Eastern and Western elements, along with those closer to their traditions. Furthermore, researchers note that recent years have seen an effort to methodically research and carefully document the variety and richness of artistic and literary expression emerging throughout the Ottoman period of Cyprus, whereas traditional interpretations have been consistently impaired by ideological constraints.58 One of the most common distortions in the Greek-Cypriot context declares (Greek-)Cypriots as having maintained a distinct and pure identity throughout time, constantly under the threat of being marred or eradicated by external influences, especially the non-Western or Ottoman. Hellenocentric ideology places Greek-Cypriots under the greater cultural community of the Greek nation (ethnos) or Hellenism, which is projected as a deep, horizontal comradeship, unbroken from ancient to modern times.

Hellenocentrism, Ancestral Continuity, and the “Truth” of National Identity Cyprus has been inhabited by humans since the Stone Age, and over the centuries it has been influenced by a variety of Eastern Mediterranean civilizations. However, the crucial point of reference for official Greek-Cypriot historiography, as Hatay and Papadakis note, is the fourteenth century BC, when Mycenaean settlers arrived on the island. Another key period is the Byzantine era, connected to medieval Greece and the “glorious” years of Christian Orthodoxy, as are the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which brought the founding of the Greek nation-state. The Greek-Cypriot nationalist narrative emphasizes “the ancient Greek origins of Greek Cypriots, a continuity with the ancient Greek past, and the (transhistorical) inclusion of Cyprus in the Hellenic world (Hellenism).”59 This key concept, viewing Hellenism as the unity and continuity of Greeks in space and time, with Cyprus being regarded as Hellenism’s eastern frontier, defending and preserving the “true” Greek identity, is also one of the most prevalent narratives in Greek-Cypriot art historiography. The following excerpt refers to celebrated Cypriot folk artist Michael Kkasialos (1885–1974): The average man of Cyprus is tied to the ancient roots of the place. This immoveable bond has actually been fundamental to the physical and national survival of

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Contemporary Art from Cyprus Cypriot Hellenism, during the endless course of turbulent historical centuries. In the works of the folk artisan of Cyprus, we detect resurrected ancestral conceptions of art and revisit decorative elements found in the depths of the centuries.60 Contemporary Cypriot art is closely linked with Modern Greek art (Neoelliniki) both sharing the common characteristics of simplicity in motifs, the sense of balance, the avoidance of extremes, and others.61

From the catalogue of an exhibition entitled Modern Greek Painting—Routes in Greece and Cyprus of the 19th and 20th Century: With the clear intention to express the truth of the place and time which they are experiencing, the pioneers of Cypriot painting move on to stylistic approaches which are firmly connected to those adopted by Greek artists of an older generation, or their own. […] In times of prosperity, but also through politically dark times or subversions, art in Cyprus remained stylistically idiosyncratic, uncompromising and powerful, as is fitting for an art we choose to define as genuine.62 […] The first 20th century Greek Cypriot artists started looking for the roots of their own civilisation within the international trends at the time and laid the foundations for the creation of an authentic form of art marked by the concerns of the new era, while at the same time preserving local elements, Byzantine traditions and national origins.63

The myth of ancestry and the broader paradigm of Hellenocentric identity is employed in this case to affirm the continuity of a specific typology of Cypriot art, linked with the art of the ancient and Byzantine traditions and preserved unspoiled throughout the ages. As Argyrou described with reference to Fabian’s “allochronic discourse,”64 Cypriot culture is endowed with a set of essential characteristics and thus reified—just as the West is reified, but in reverse—both by Westerners and by Cypriots themselves. As culture, and in this case art, becomes frozen in time, it acquires a “true” identity, an authenticity that the genuine Cypriot artist resurrects in an almost metaphysical way. As Bryant notes, this uniqueness, or the sense of an independent Cypriot culture standing apart from the respective “motherlands,” only became possible to imagine when Greek-Cypriots attained a higher standard of living; from this more powerful position, it was safer, for instance, to acknowledge the value of local traditions and folk culture.65 Paradoxically, however, and due to the wide range of factors previously addressed, this shift still failed to strip identity from its nationalist referents. On the one hand, the idiosyncrasies of Cypriot art have consistently been celebrated next to its perceived kinship with ancient Greek values (i.e., simplicity, balance, or “metron”), and often with the broader grouping of Greek modern art (“Neoelliniki techni”), which is not to deny the influences from Greece due to many Greek-Cypriot artists having studied there; on the other hand, Greek art historiography seems to have influenced the few writings on Cypriot art, not only as far as the content of cultural motifs is concerned, but also in terms of style and terminology, the focus on the Western modernist canon and the generational classification of artists. What is noted, at the same time, is the multiplicity of directions in Cypriot art, and its stronger affiliation,

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especially in the first half of the twentieth century, to Western art centers rather than to the Greek Academy.66

Tradition, High Modernism, and the Modern Artist’s Cult One final point of interest is how the artist and the artwork become validated through art-historical accounts and monographs. The following extracts refer to some of the most celebrated mid-twentieth-century Cypriot artists: On George Pol. Georghiou (1901–72): A significant point of departure for his painting language is Byzantine art, which he enriches with conquests and characteristics of European manierism, while he is deeply influenced by the work of Domenicos Theotocopoulos (El Greco). Indeed, in one of his most significant endeavours he manages to combine, in a fertile manner, elements of the gothic artistic tradition, containing styles of manierism and characteristics of Byzantine painting, with quests of German expressionism.67

On Adamantios Diamantis (1900–94): Of special importance are the artistic quests of Adamantios Diamantis, who, after being a brilliant student at the Royal College of Art in London, returned to Cyprus, leaving his mark, with his long creative presence on almost a century of Cypriot art. A painter of the epic and the monumental, he tried to link himself with man and the environment, to see them through historical continuity, projecting their stable and enduring elements. He was associated with the post-impressionist movements and with French painting of the 20th century. He created a personal style through selective use of abstract and expressionist motifs, schematisation and use of some characteristics of the cubists’ vocabulary, exploitation of colour symbolism and his fertile contact with Byzantine art.68

On Telemachos Kanthos (1910–93): An artist (“dimiourgos”)69 who adopts decisive elements of the work of Constantinos Parthenis,70 his teacher at the School of Fine Arts (of Athens) and of Cézanne, whose work he came to know early on, Kanthos quickly moves into a clearly personal artistic idiom, based on the role of chromatic values.71

On Christoforos Savva (1924–68),72 considered to be the father of Cypriot contemporary art: He was the first artist to embrace the spirit of internationalism, opening a dialogue with the co-dwelling73 element and with foreign civilisations, who understood and investigated new paths in art, but at the same time the artist that embraced the particular civilisational elements of his country and used them to feed his art,

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Contemporary Art from Cyprus without pushing away what is foreign, but instead with respect to difference. He was also the artist that did not negotiate his artistic capacity and freedom and did not succumb to social or ideological biddings, but lived and created as an artist, ignoring the social practices of the traditional Cypriot society.74

Last but not least, a telling statement where Cypriot and Greek painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are seen as having jointly embarked on a noble quest: Undoubtedly, the pioneers also channel their focus, producing formal idioms, in areas such as those of the ancient-like, Byzantine, but also folk art […] The island is a crossroads. Yiannis Tsarouchis75 comments on the importance of small nodal areas defining it as a bitter privilege.76 […] The world of Dimitris Lipertis77 could easily constitute the ideal ideological platform in the aspirations of Cypriot artists. In one of his poems written at the end of the 1920s, Lipertis expresses the certainty that ‘it’s the mind that elevates a generation’.78 This strong aphorism illustrates the need for a meditative expression of ideas and consequently the responsibility of their elevation, on the part of the artists, into a high formal quality.79

Very often, the work of Cypriot artists, especially those who have come to be known as the “fathers” of Cypriot art (forerunners tended to be male), has been compared to the work of major figures of modernism, in an effort to validate the former’s contributions with respect to the norm that Western art represents; examples of this are found in almost every text in the examined literature, corresponding to the arguments of Argyrou on Eurocentrism, symbolic domination, and the “Western ideal.” At the same time, the problems and contradictions in relation to the formal history of modernism are dealt with through an attempt to illustrate the special characteristics of Cypriot art as an insightful synthesis of international conquests with distinctive personal styles, informed by local history, tradition, and color. This tendency is in line with what Ajay Sinha describes as a “pluralistic” position,80 based on the principle of eclectic borrowing and synthesis of various Western elements with past local traditions. In the context of postcolonial India, there is a similar “confluence of discourses” in artistic and arthistorical narratives: Geeta Kapur points to the “melodrama of classical tradition” and the “existential pressure of the high modern” as elements of fictive histories in search for the “lost cause of a certain civilisational order.”81 These idealized accounts, founded on past and invented traditions, are taken along with others as testimony to the “false normativity of the bourgeois cultural order” that outlines postcolonial subjectivity. This is symptomatic of the fact that in Cypriot society, notions around the modern “cult” of the artist, as Paul Barolsky82 described it, or the artist as a hero of the Western world striving for artistic perfection, have been formative to the self-conception of subsequent generations of artists, entrapped in a sort of romantic idealism around authorship and creative subjectivity. They may also have contributed in sustaining a kind of Greeenbergian appreciation of the artwork, informing mainstream Cypriot taste. The persistence of such notions to the present day has arguably interrupted the exploration of crucial questions of the modern period, such as those concerning national and cultural identification, with all the related political and sociohistorical

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implications. For Kapur and other theorists, it is only through the critical questioning of the monolithic scripts of modernist hierarchies that the possibilities of alternative cultures and modernities can be concretely articulated.83 What this brief overview suggests is that the general ideological viewpoints expressed through historiographic literature on Cypriot art, whether consciously of not, almost invariably reflect the dominant Greek-Cypriot narratives on national and cultural identity. In short, mainstream texts are notable for the absence of critical and theoretically informed discussions of Greek-Cypriot art. What we in fact have is eulogies: eulogies of individual artists; of the continuity, creativity, and supremacy of the Greek spirit; and of the superiority of the West. In fact, as the previous examples illustrate, the sum of writings that can be classified as art history in the context of Cyprus does not escape many of the typical modalities identified by Elkins84 in his global examination of art-historical practices, concerning countries both within and beyond the Western domain: 1. In many non-Western countries, writings basically constitute ad hoc histories that are largely based on personal biographical or stylistic appreciations of artists. 2. Art histories are closely connected to the sense of national and regional identity, the notions of nationalism or ethnicity often appearing as an explicit impetus behind art-historical study, affecting its direction and content. 3. Some of the most relevant texts on art are produced by scholars who are familiar with theories and, conversely, unfamiliarity with theories risks producing texts that are out of touch. 4. It is important to distinguish between art history and art criticism—a point that would also serve to highlight the limitations of both disciplines in the Cypriot case. 5. Art history is still largely attached to a specific canon of artists made up of major figures, mostly European and North American dead, white male painters. 6. Art history is informed by a specific set of grand-scale narratives, as for instance the plots of the Antiquity, of the Renaissance or of post-modern appropriations, to the extent that even attempts to craft alternative modern art histories eventually become trapped in Western comparisons or guided by Western conceptual schemata. There are many implications here, compelling a sense of responsibility for the specialized writer to embrace diversified knowledge. One must resist the notion that art history can or should be global, despite the understanding that some of the most significant achievements in theory and criticism, as Hall85 remarks, were produced through the historicization of aesthetic practices that were conceived as being universal. In a kind of reversed argument, Elkins stresses that, while the existence of multiple histories and aesthetic traditions imposes the division of history into local practices, it is important to share the interpretative methods of art history, in order to efficiently address the particular—and potentially incoherent or contested—stories of these localities. In other words, if art historians are to produce informed texts, they have an obligation to read widely and in a sustained manner, gaining awareness about and beyond their

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proximal environment, subject matter, and discipline.86 To effectively serve its cause, Kapur asserts, art history has to “evolve structures of reflexivity.”87 What these positions reassert in our case is that a history of Cypriot art cannot remain locked into continually referencing the official, Eurocentric, art-historical version of modernity. The urge to validate the former by comparing with mainstream modernism always turns out to be a rather discouraging task, promoting a Eurocentric view of a marginal cultural production as directly deriving from the West. The employment of Western interpretative strategies and adoption of a formalist arthistorical approach to guide the interpretation of artworks seem to impair the scope and logic of this practice, enforcing a sense of inadequacy in both artists’ selfconceptions and the public’s perception of its own culture as always lagging behind a certain prestigious norm. At the same time, there is an urgent need for a critical articulation around the legacies of Cypriot modern art in order to identify and deconstruct the ideologies of national identification that besiege them. Undoubtedly, an extraordinary effort is required by the inquisitive scholar to dialectically disrupt the dominant or emblematic conceptions of Cypriot art, society, and identity, in order to reposition crucial issues through layers of cognitive and psychological sedimentation and make the invisible visible. Cyprus is an ambivalent space at the margins of Europe, reflecting the notional dichotomies between national-international, traditional-modern, East-West and local-global; these paradoxical and non-linear relationships are arguably key features of Cypriot postcolonial modernity and art. Certainly, contemporary artistic sensibilities are inextricably attuned to these questions and the need for the employment of theoretical, historical, and analytical perspectives in their negotiation is ever increasing. The pairing of art, politics, nation, and modernity seems to open a vast range of discursive and analytical potential for contemporary art, while possibly expanding the discipline’s scope to cultural intervention on these and other loci of inquiry like gender, sexuality, class, and migration, consistently neglected in peripheral sites such as the one in question, throughout modernity. While reflecting on these symptoms and quandaries in the Cypriot context, I feel compelled to argue that, if art history and criticism in Cyprus seek to contribute significantly to the realm of contemporary art and culture, they inevitably need to engage in the critical and theoretical discourses pertaining to colonial and postcolonial modernity and the Cypriot predicament in particular. The grand narrative of art history, as Stuart Hall argues, is increasingly understood as functioning next to many other narratives, only due to an awareness of the deep historical and cultural shifts that have succeeded the “modern moment.”88 With established configurations of art history and aesthetics starting to disintegrate, the understanding of the modern as a historical category enables us to look back at its evolution and question what might follow it. The responsibility of contemporary historiographic and theoretical sensibilities, in peripheral sites in particular, is then to consider the “deflection” of history to culture, and the necessity to shift the central focus from historical context to the cultural and socio-political conditions in which art or art-writing is produced.

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Notes 1

As part of a broader doctoral research connecting contemporary art in Cyprus with postcolonial theory. See, Louli Michaelidou, “Cyprus in Venice (1968–2009): A Case Study of National Representation in the Venice Biennale—Art, Politics and Modernity at the Margins of Europe” (PhD diss., Royal College of Art, London, 2013). 2 James Elkins, Is Art History Global? (New York and London: Routledge, 2007). 3 Kobena Mercer, Cosmopolitan Modernisms (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2005 and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 6–23. 4 Stuart Hall, “Museums of Modern Art and the End of History,” in Annotations. 6, Modernity and Difference, ed. S. Campbell and G. Tawadros (London: Institute of International Visual Arts (InIVA), 2001), 19. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 14. 7 This is not to deny the existence of isolated critical texts by other writers, which would require a separate review. The study was primarily concerned with mainstream historiographic attempts. 8 See in particular, Chrysanthos Christou, Σύντομη Ιστορία της Νεώτερης και Σύγχρονης Κυπριακής Τέχνης (A Short History of Modern and Contemporary Cypriot Art) (Nicosia: Cultural Service of the Ministry of Education, 1983); Eleni S. Nikita, Η εικαστική κίνηση στην Κύπρο aπό τις αρχές του αιώνα μας ως την ανεξαρτησία (Visual arts activity in Cyprus from the start of the century up to independence) (Nicosia: Cultural Services of the Ministry of Education, 1997); Eleni S. Nikita, “Points of Reference—Introduction,” in State Gallery of Contemporary Cypriot Art (Nicosia: Ministry of Education and Culture, 1998); Eleni S. Nikita, Cypriot Artists— The First Generation (Nicosia: Marfin Laiki Cultural Publications, 2003); Anna Marangou et al., Cyprus Art in the 20th Century (Nicosia: New Cyprus Association, 2005); Marina Schiza, 50 Years of the Republic of Cyprus—50 Years of Artistic Creation (Nicosia: Cyprus Chamber of Fine Arts—E.KA.TE, 2010). 9 Christou, A Short History, 14; Nikita, “Points of Reference,” 15; Schiza, 50 Years of the Republic, 15. 10 Although, as it is argued later, this positioning between East and West is often overlooked in favor of a Western link of artistic production. 11 See among others, Nikita, “Points of Reference,” 16; Christou, A Short History, 10; Eleni S. Nikita, “Introduction,” in From Chisel to Electron: A Century of Contemporary Sculpture in Cyprus, ed. Y. Toumazis and E.S. Nikita (Nicosia: Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, Cultural Services of the Ministry of Education and Culture, The British Council, Laiki Bank Cultural Centre, 2000), 14; Marangou et al., Cyprus Art in the 20th Century, 16–18; Schiza, 50 Years of the Republic, 19. 12 Nikita, “Points of Reference,” 12. 13 Ibid., 26. 14 At the start of the century, legal and structural inequality between the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities is already prevalent on the island. This situation, created during the British rule, favored the Greek Cypriots. This may explain why Greek-Cypriots at the time had more, if not exclusive access to art education abroad (no similar records have been found on Turkish-Cypriots). See pertinent analyses in, Rebecca Bryant, Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus

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(London and New York: I.B. Tauris and the United States: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 46–7; Peter Loizos, “Aspects of Pluralism in Cyprus” (New Community, 1972), reprinted in Unofficial Views—Cyprus: Society and Politics (Nicosia: Intercollege Press, 2001), 17. 15 See indicatively, Christou, A Short History, 55, 78, 95; Nikita, “Points of Reference,” 17, 20–2, 25, 28, 30–1; Nikita, Visual Arts Activity, 20–1, 26–9, 32, 34–5, 48, 50. 16 This refers to the political and social instability that characterized the early decades of the twentieth century in Cyprus. The island, being part of the Ottoman Empire since 1571 and mostly composed of Greek-speaking Christians and a minority of Turkish-speaking Muslims, was ceded to Great Britain in 1878. At the start of the First World War in 1914, the island was annexed to Britain and declared a Crown Colony in 1925, following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Colonial rule was a period that saw the rise of competing senses of nationalism by the two main ethnic communities of Cyprus, with vehement identifications of each with their respective “motherlands”: Greece and Turkey. From 1955 to 1959, the period of EOKA’s anticolonial struggle, Greek-Cypriots fought for enosis (union with Greece), while the Turkish-Cypriots, in response, battled for taksim (division), setting up their own armed organization, the TMT. This period was also characterized by violent conflict between EOKA and the Greek-Cypriot Left, who opposed the form and timing of the struggle, and between Greek-Cypriots and the Turkish-Cypriots who opposed enosis. 17 Christou, A Short History, 95–101; Nikita, “Points of Reference,” 25–7. 18 See specific examples in the relevant section that follows. 19 Nikita, “Points of Reference,” 22–3; Nikita, Visual Arts Activity, 20–1, 26–9, 32–3, 48–9. 20 Nikita, “Points of Reference,” 29. 21 Christou, A Short History, 15, my translation. 22 Eleni S. Nikita (b. 1947) is a Greek-Cypriot art historian and writer, trained in Athens under Professor Chrysanthos Christou. In 1977, she joined the Culture Department of the Ministry of Education and Culture (MoEC), specializing in visual arts; she was the department’s Director between 2003 and 2009. While at the MoEC, she also acted as both commissioner and curator of the Cyprus Pavilion at the Venice Biennale from 1986 until 2001. 23 Chrysanthos Christou (1922–2016) was a Greek art historian. From 1965 to 1978, he was a professor of Modern Art at the University of Thessaloniki and later at the Athens School of Fine Art. He later focused on Greek art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 24 Nikita, Visual Arts Activity, 8. Christou, A Short History, 7; Nikita, From Chisel to Electron, 26. 25 Nikita, “Points of Reference,” 15. 26 Schiza, 50 Years of the Republic, 15. 27 Notice the frequent use of the word “prey.” 28 Antonis Hadjikyriacou, “Society and Economy on an Ottoman Island: Cyprus in the Eighteenth Century” (PhD diss., Department of History, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2011). 29 Ibid., 75–6. 30 Nikita, “Points of Reference,” 12. 31 Marangou et al., Cyprus Art in the 20th Century, 19. 32 Savvas Christodoulides, “Οι Καλλιτέχνες της Προσήλωσης” (“The Artists of Devotion”), in Νεοελληνική Ζωγραφική—Διαδρομές στην Ελλάδα και στην Κύπρο

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του 19ου και 20ού αιώνα (Modern Greek Painting—Journeys in Greece and Cyprus of the 19th and 20th Century), ed. A. Schina (Nicosia: Embassy of Greece in Cyprus, Nicosia Municipality, 2010), 15. 33 Nikita, “Points of Reference,” 12. 34 Ibid., 24–5. 35 Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece (New York: Pella Pub Co, 1982). 36 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 37 Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 38 Vassos Argyrou, Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean: The Wedding as Symbolic Struggle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 17; Vassos Argyrou, “Postscript: Reflections on an Anthropology of Cyprus,” in Divided Cyprus Modernity, History, and an Island in Conflict, ed. Y. Papadakis, N. Peristianis, and G. N. Welz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 216; Vassos Argyrou, “Independent Cyprus? Postcoloniality and the Spectre of Europe,” Cyprus Review 22, no. 2 (Nicosia 2010): 43. 39 Argyrou, Tradition and Modernity, 177. 40 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 41 Nikita, “Points of Reference,” 16. 42 The term used in the original Greek title, corresponding to “modern,” is “νεώτερη” (neoteri, meaning “newer,” “younger,” “more recent”), denoting a transition to something new, or modernity at large. In this context, the preference of writers for this term over “μοντέρνα” (moderna, meaning “modern”) is consistent with the view discussed in the previous section, that twentieth-century Cypriot art cannot be called modern because it was not aligned with Western modernism. 43 The non-differentiation between the term “Turk” and the more historically accurate “Ottoman” is commonly encountered in Greek-Cypriot discourse. 44 Christou, A Short History, 10, my translation. 45 Nikita, From Chisel to Electron, 14, my translation (the existing catalogue translation differed slightly from the original Greek and was adjusted to convey the correct meaning). 46 For a thorough analysis, see Yiannis Papadakis and Mete Hatay, “A Critical Comparison of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot Historiographies (1940s to the Present),” in Cyprus and the Politics of Memory: History, Community and Conflict, ed. R. Bryant and Y. Papadakis (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 27–50. 47 However, this does not seem to be a consistent position, even within texts by the same writers. 48 See in particular, Rebecca Bryant, “On the Condition of Postcoloniality in Cyprus,” in Divided Cyprus Modernity, History, and an Island in Conflict, ed. Y. Papadakis, N. Peristianis, and G.N. Welz (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 47–65; Yiannis Papadakis, History Education in Divided Cyprus: A Comparison of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot Schoolbooks on the “History of Cyprus” (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute (PRIO), 2008), 5–12; Herzfeld, Ours Once More, 20; Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 25, 107, 117, 125; Papadakis and Hatay, “A Critical Comparison,” 27–50; Nikos

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49

50 51

52

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Contemporary Art from Cyprus Peristianis, “Cypriot Nationalism, Dual Identity, and Politics,” in Divided Cyprus Modernity, History, and an Island in Conflict, ed. Y. Papadakis, N. Peristianis, and G.N. Welz (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 100–20. The book was published under the auspices of the New Cyprus Association (an NGO established in 1975 to promote rapprochement and mutual understanding among the communities of Cyprus, toward the goal of reunification) and was supported by USAID and the UNDP. Ten Greek-Cypriots and two Turkish-Cypriots were involved: Photographer Mehmet Uluhan, and artist-journalist-writer Ümit İnatçi, who is well known in the Greek-Cypriot art scene, often participating in bicommunal projects. It would be interesting to investigate the Turkish-Cypriot collaborators’ involvement in the texts and their views on the depiction of their own community in the book, especially in view of statements such as: “In small societies [the Greek version refers specifically to the ‘Turkish-Cypriot community’, a reference which is omitted in the English, and in the Turkish becomes ‘our community’] that have been conquered many times and do not have a homogeneous cultural structure, it is difficult for art to become an intellectual activity fueled by philosophy and social influences” (Marangou et al., Cyprus Art in the 20th Century, 19–20). Ibid., 16–18. Despite E.KA.TE.’s traditionally positive stance vis-à-vis Turkish-Cypriot artists, the latter have not been particularly active within the Chamber. A similar organization representing Turkish-Cypriot artists, the Eastern Mediterranean Arts Association (EMAA), operates in the North. For some historical background explaining the ambivalence of this anniversary within and between the two main communities, see Yiannis Papadakis, “The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Cyprus,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 3, no. 1 (1993): 139–54. Papadakis analyzes the politics of commemoration with respect to the celebrations of Cypriot independence. Since 1960, the respective political orientations of the two major communities shifted considerably, affecting the ways in which this “historical date” was perceived. For Greek-Cypriots, independence initially spelled the end of their pursuit for union (enosis) with Greece, and was only declared a public holiday as late as 1979, mainly to reinforce the legitimacy of the Republic of Cyprus against the threat of the unrecognized “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.” Conversely, while Turkish-Cypriots were initially welcoming of Cyprus’s independence, they later became critical of it, due to a number of political events that resulted in their exclusion from political and civic participation in the Republic. Moreover, the commemorations for independence were meant to signal a unified state, which stood in stark contrast to the reality of a politically and geographically divided country. Not surprisingly, the Turkish-Cypriot artists declined the invitation to participate in the exhibition and its perceived symbolism. Besides, had they participated and symbolically embraced the (in practice) Greek-Cypriot controlled Republic of Cyprus, they might have been accused of betraying and undermining their own polity, even though the Turkish-Cypriot state has not received international recognition. On July 8, 2010, Turkish-Cypriot artist Zehra Sonya addressed a letter to E.KA.TE., explaining that, although she had previously participated in peace-promoting events organized by the Chamber with the support of the Cyprus Republic, she would decline this particular invitation that celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Cyprus Republic, considering it a “… highly political exhibition that promotes nationalist arguments.” She added that she has also abstained from

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events in the North celebrating the so-called Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), seeing all these manifestations as barriers to peace and reconciliation on the island. The Greek-Cypriot curator included an image of the artist’s letter in the catalogue, stating: “The difficulty of obtaining works by Turkish Cypriots […], due to the limited cooperation between the two sides in conjunction with the reluctance or even the refusal of young Turkish Cypriot artists to take part, highlights the dividing line that has been created, in parallel with the Green Line, in the artistic life of Greek and Turkish Cypriots. […] It seems […] that the invitation caused some kind of an embarrassment to Turkish Cypriot artists who feel that the lack of a solution to the Cyprus problem does not yet allow them to be included in this framework” (Schiza, 50 Years of the Republic, 65). Incidentally, two Turkish-Cypriot artists, Simge Uygur and Serap Kanay, participated in another exhibition of Cypriot artists in Paris (“Chypre 2010. L’art au present,” Espace Commines, Paris, curated by Yiannis Toumazis and Andri Michael), which was placed in the framework of the state commemorations program, but claimed a more self-reflective and critical perspective on Cypriot political reality. 54 Schiza, 50 Years of the Republic, 19. 55 Hadjikyriakou, Society and Economy, 21. 56 N.M. Michael, E. Gavriel, and M. Kappler, eds., Ottoman Cyprus: A Collection of Studies on History and Culture (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009). 57 Iosif Hadjikyriakos, “The Decorative Arts in Cyprus: Representation of a Society from the 17th to the 19th Century,” in Ottoman Cyprus: A Collection of Studies on History and Culture, ed. N.M. Michael, E. Gavriel, and M. Kappler (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009), 260. 58 Hadjikyriacou, Society and Economy, 19–20; Hadjikyriakos: “The Decorative Arts in Cyprus,” 259–83; Matthias Kappler, “Toward a Common Turkish and Greek Literary History in Ottoman Cyprus,” in Ottoman Cyprus: A Collection of Studies on History and Culture, 285. 59 Papadakis and Hatay, “A Critical Comparison,” 29. 60 Patroklos Stavrou, “The Folk Artist Kkasialos,” Kathimerini, 7 Imeres feature, 1997, 14, my translation. 61 Chrysanthos Christou, “Γενάρχες της Κυπριακής Τέχνης” (“The Fathers of Cypriot Art”), Kathimerini, 7 Imeres feature, 1997, 6, my translation. 62 Christodoulides, “The Artists of Devotion,” 14, my translation. 63 Marangou et al., Cyprus Art in the 20th Century, 19–20. 64 Argyrou, Tradition and Modernity, 177; Fabian, Time and the Other, 37. 65 Bryant, Imagining the Modern, 7. 66 Compare, for example, the respective introductions in the catalogues of the Cyprus State Gallery and the Greek National Gallery: Nikita, “Points of Reference,” 15–31; Chrysanthos Christou, “Η Ελληνική Ζωγραφική στην Εθνική Πινακοθήκη” (“Greek Painting at the National Gallery”); Η Εθνική Πινακοθήκη, Eλληνική Zωγραφική 19ος20ος aιώνας (The National Gallery: 19th and 20th Century Greek Painting) (Athens: Ekdotiki Athinon, 1992), 12–25. 67 Christou, “Fathers of Cypriot Art,” 7; In the same article, Christou notably quotes a complimentary review of Pol. Georghiou’s work by British author Lawrence Durell. Durell was the author of Bitter Lemons (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), a personal account of life in colonial Cyprus, which was later criticized for its imperialist undertones. 68 Nikita, “Points of Reference,” 19–20.

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69 The Greek word for “creator,” often used in lieu of “artist.” 70 The Greek painter Constantinos Parthenis (1878–1967) is considered a pivotal figure in the development of art in twentieth-century Greece. 71 Christou, “Fathers of Cypriot Art,” 9, my translation. 72 Christoforos Savva was among the six artists to represent Cyprus in its first official participation in the Venice Biennale, in 1968. Despite his untimely death at the age of forty-four, he managed to leave behind a remarkable legacy for the subsequent development of contemporary art on the island. 73 A literal translation of siniko stichio, a de-personalizing term that has been used by Greek-Cypriots following independence to recognize and contain Turkish-Cypriots in the new state. 74 Eleni S. Nikita, Χριστόφορος Σάββα: Η Απαρχή μιας Νέας Εποχής στην Κυπριακή Τέχνη (Christophoros Savva: The Beginning of a New Era in Cypriot Art) (Nicosia: Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, 2008), 140, my translation. 75 Yiannis Tsarouchis (1910–89) was a key post-war Greek painter. 76 Another example of the classic argument on the fate of the island—see previous section and Hadjikyriacou, Society and Economy. 77 Dimitris Lipertis (1866–1937) is one of the most celebrated Greek-Cypriot poets. 78 The text uses the original poet’s phrase in the Greek-Cypriot dialect “εν ο νους που την γενιάν ψηλώνει” (en o nous pou tin genian psilonei). 79 Christodoulides, “The Artists of Devotion,” 14–15, my translation. 80 Sinha, J. Ajay, “Contemporary Indian Art: A Question of Method,” Art Journal 58 (2009): 31–9. 81 Geeta Kapur, “The Centre-Periphery Model or How Are We Placed? Contemporary Cultural Practice in India,” Third Text 5, 16, no. 17 (Autumn-Winter 1991): 16. 82 Paul Barolsky, A Brief History of the Artist from God to Picasso (Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 2010), 45–58. In the chapter titled “Dante and the Modern Cult of the Artist,” the author suggests that the modern idea of the artist is rooted in the image of the epic poet, from Homer to Dante, demonstrating that art history is inseparable from historical fiction, which in turn feeds the artist’s self-conception and imagination on a number of levels. 83 See in particular, Appadurai, Modernity at large, 5–11; Okwui Enwezor, “PlaceMaking or in the ‘Wrong Place’: Contemporary Art and the Postcolonial Condition,” in Lyon Biennial 2007: 00s-the History of a Decade That Has Not Yet Been Named, ed. S. Moisdon and H-U. Obrist (Zürich: JRP/Ringier, 2007), 209–25; Stuart Hall and Sarat Maharaj, “Modernity and Difference,” in Annotations. 6, Modernity and Difference, ed. S. Campbell and G. Tawadros (London: Institute of International Visual Arts (InIVA), 2001), 36–56; Kapur, “The Centre-Periphery Model,” 9–17; Geeta Kapur, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000); Mercer, Cosmopolitan Modernisms, 19–22; Kobena Mercer, “Intermezzo Worlds,” Art Journal 57 (1998): 43–5; Partha Mitter, “Reflections on Modern Art and National Identity in Colonial India: An interview,” in Cosmopolitan Modernisms, ed. Kobena Mercer (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2005 and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 24–49. 84 Elkins, Is Art History Global? 3–23. 85 Hall and Maharaj, “Modernity and Difference,” 14. 86 Elkins, Is Art History Global? 14–18, 21–3. 87 Kapur, “The Centre-Periphery Model,” 16. 88 Hall and Maharaj, “Modernity and Difference,” 9–11.

2

From Narration to Dialogue? Thinking about the Way We Talk about Contemporary Visual Art in the Turkish Cypriot Community Esra Plumer Bardak

This chapter attempts to evaluate how art writing and documentation have developed in the Turkish Cypriot community in the absence of state institutional frameworks. The study’s focus takes 1974 as a starting point, the year in which thousands of Turkish Cypriots who had been previously living in enclaves across the island emigrated to the north of Cyprus, eventually forming a unilateral independent state in 1983. The artistic activities of this small community, comparable in population to Iceland, are observed in alternative forms of documentation that can be characterized as fragmentary, similar to the environment in which it is formed. A selection of relatively unknown sources on art in the Turkish Cypriot community is discussed with primary attention given to different platforms through which the local community have access to, can engage with, and talk about art. As the title of this chapter suggests, dialogue, particularly self-reflexively looking at how art is discussed, is central to this study. The overview of these sources will indicate that fragmented records of contemporary practices have helped form a collection of petit récits (little narratives) that emphasize localized stories without forming a centripetal narrative of Turkish Cypriot art.1 By highlighting the lack of metanarratives, contemporary practices will be seen to have formed under the guise of dialogue in alternative forms of documentation such as mass-media organs and reportage. The local art and culture television program Sanat Güncesi (Art Journal) and printed matter produced by art societies, as well as the art magazines Kültür-Sanat (Culture-Art Review) are particular platforms that anchor this study. The chapter begins by looking at discussions and concerns on art expressed in print media from the late 1970s to the 1990s on the accessibility, reception of, and responses to art and then moves on to observing the emergence of the artist’s interview format on Art Journal. It then suggests that, in several hundred programs, Art Journal has captured/ created a mold around talking about and interacting with visual art. This is identified and referred to as the canon of reportage: the formation of a mainstream by means of alternative methods, namely reportage media rooted in listening and responding.

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Here, Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and heteroglossia are considered relevant in understanding discussions around art that have accumulated within the community over the past forty years outside of traditional forms of arthistorical documentation.2 The translation of Bakhtin’s seminal texts into English in the 1980s coincides with the peak of self-reflexive dialogue in the Turkish Cypriot community on contemporary art. Taking up a trans-disciplinary approach, Bakhtinian concepts are referred to in essence, though not confer in depth, along with wider communication theory. Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodernist critique of modernism as metanarrative is cited as pivotal in distinguishing between pre-twenty-first-century longing for grand narratives and a post-twenty-first-century approach in taking ownership over the existing fragmentary history without expecting a comprehensive wholeness. The study concludes by looking at how more recent forms of reportage attempt to accommodate contemporary practices that take place in temporary spaces/ galleries. Exhibitions in the late twentieth century are discussed alongside twenty-firstcentury event-based art forms, which are read as centrifugal acts that reflect a change in the production, reception, and display of art. By drawing attention to the paradigm shift that occurs in both the display and documentation of art, such as the impact of event-based practices on the format of Art Journal, critical questions are raised: How may written texts and recorded dialogues have a dual function–primarily as a practical communication tool to voice contemporaneous needs and concerns and secondly as a historical source for research? Can these lead the way to more critical discussions within art-historical discourse?

Looking at ‘the Way We Talk about Art’3 The visual arts scene within the Turkish Cypriot community in Cyprus has been growing since the late 1970s, outside of the Republic of Cyprus state structure, without a centralized system to support record and archive artistic activities and exhibitions, hindering the development of a culture of critical reflection, art writing, and thought. Whilst there is a sea of literature on the history of the island, there is little writing on art: most in the form of reportage; columns published in newspapers, supplements, and magazines; and less so in the form of journals and books. The importance of journalism during and after Cyprus’s colonial years is well documented and a number of shortlived newspapers and periodicals published at this time, between 1918 and 1966, are notable sources for early discussions on art and culture. In 2008, the Association of Turkish Cypriot Librarians, under the leadership of Sibel Liminici and Umure Örs, chronicled newspaper clippings that mention or discuss the arts and culture from the 1940s up to 2008. The accumulation of writing on art and culture in this medium requires dedicated research and analysis, although this surpasses the parameters of the current chapter.4 Art critic and historian Hal Foster recalls that by the middle of the late 1970s, theoretical reflection in art “became as important as artistic production,” serving as a continuation of modernism and occupying “the position of high art, at least to the extent that it retained such values as difficulty and distinction.”5 In the Turkish Cypriot community, the influential art association, Görsel Sanatçılar Derneği

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(Society of Visual Artists), established in 1978, can be considered as a milestone; playing an important role in “getting artists to meet one another, encouraging them in their work and organizing art exhibitions, even if the only places where works of art could be put on public display were schools, sport facilities and hotels.”6Although the society gradually disintegrated over time, it represented the first real efforts after the partition of the island to draw attention to visual art, heralding new ideals through which to support the production and dissemination of their works in exhibitions and promote reflection on art in quality print material. Print culture in the community was a valued and practical medium that, especially in the field of art and literature, could be easily produced and widely disseminated. In addition to newspaper columns and supplements, by the early 1980s a number of dedicated art journals and periodicals were being produced. One of the founders of the society, artist Cevdet Çağdaş describes the 1980s as “a period of stagnation, nonetheless characterized by occasional interesting activities.”7 Çağdaş recalls the first issue of Kıbrıs Sanat Dergisi (Cyprus Art Review) (1981–2) in September 1981 and describes it as a type of publication that was representative of the community as a whole.8 Çağdaş saw the potential of the journal as a vehicle for representing a Turkish Cypriot identity in line with the identity politics of the era.9 The Culture-Art Review (1985–2003) is another notable example, which became an esteemed periodical that was launched primarily as a quarterly publication and generated excitement around discussing and encouraging the development of art on a potentially wider scope. Çağdaş points out that the journal comprised not only literature on art and culture but also reproductions of visual art works, featuring an artist’s work on its cover as well as several drawings and reproductions alongside texts and poetry inside each issue. Thus, it had a significant function as a visual source as well as being a literary one.10 The journal’s visual aspect can be seen to accumulate a canonical presentation of active artists whose works are presented in a prestigious format (Figure 2.1). Çağdaş was a regular contributor and had also contributed to newspapers and supplements as a columnist in previous years. In 1982, the Society of Visual Artists published a compilation of texts written by Çağdaş for newspaper columns in the form of a book entitled Sanat Yazıları (Writings on Art). As one of the first essays that reflexively focus on contemporary art practices in the Turkish Cypriot community, Çağdaş’ text “Bana göre sanatımız nerededir?” (Where are our art standards, in my opinion?) is an evaluation of the status of art in the 1980s. Çağdaş expresses a concern for and a degree of skepticism about contemporary practices, particularly in reference to the dissatisfaction at the receiver’s end.11 However, the essay does not clearly reference these supposed responses; therefore, it can be seen as simultaneously pointing to a lack of documentation (a particular critical reaction/interaction), whilst itself acting as a documented response. During the years of inter-communal conflict, and after the 1974 Turkish intervention, the island was swept by nationalist and divisive views.12 A majority of Turkish Cypriot artists, writers, poets, and the wider general public became preoccupied with history writing and the importance of legacy, record-keeping, and documentation. In line with this, production and investment took shape in the early 1980s to support and sustain the Turkish Cypriot identity through art and culture. The

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Figure 2.1  Kültür Sanat Dergisi (Culture Art Review), Issue 10, September 1992. Cover image: Emin Çizenel. Copyright © Türk Bankası AŞ. Courtesy of Türk Bankası AŞ.

1982 exhibition Kıbrıs Türk Resim ve Heykel Sanatında Dün-Bügün (Yesterday and Today of Turkish Cypriot Art and Sculpture), which included thirty artists and over one-hundred works, can be considered as testament to the prolificacy of artists as well as a nationalistic drive to establish a Turkish Cypriot identity within the spectrum of

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art and culture. Calling writers and art critics to view and respond to the exhibition, Çağdaş put forward a number of questions to be raised in relation to the exhibited works compared to the Western art paradigm and the art of Turkey: How far have Turkish Cypriot artists come with this exhibition in the field of plastic arts? What level have they reached? Let them prove its existence, let them come and observe and write about it. We should not be the only ones writing about ourselves.13

Çağdaş’ call, which was specifically directed at Turkish critics and historians due to the assumed lack of eligible scholars within the community in Cyprus, assigns equal importance to the need for reflection and for recognition.14 Alongside its nationalistic tone, Çağdaş’ question requests an evaluation or response as a way of forming a narrative that emulates established Western examples (anlatmak: to narrate). In The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that “all words, both in ‘living conversation’; and in written texts are ‘oriented’ towards a response of some kind.”15 Similarly, Çağdaş’ comments on the display of art are oriented toward a deliberate call for and desired expectation for a “response” in the form of a critical evaluation, which measured in communicational terms, becomes paramount: here, “the only thing more valuable than extensive reach is complex, intimate feedback.”16 At the same time, serious efforts were made toward establishing a public art museum that represented Turkish Cypriot art, without success. With a growing number of artists and increased artistic production, discussions on the need for dedicated spaces for exhibitions dominated the art scene. Associations and societies were organizing regular events and activities that relieved and simultaneously further aggravated this need.17 Çağdaş, among others, warned that the lack of such environments would eventually lead to the demise of art: “Artists want attention, they want an environment, […] they want a stimulus. If these are not available, then art is not there.”18 In 1984, the highly anticipated Atatürk Cultural Centre (AKM) was opened in Nicosia as the first dedicated cultural center. The inauguration of the center was said to have led art (painting in particular) into a “golden age” and, as a result, both the number and quality of artists were claimed to have increased.19 Following the opening of AKM, a number of private galleries and exhibition halls were also launched, including the Fluxus Gallery (1988–91), the HP Gallery (1991–8), and the Vision Art Gallery (1995). In the late 1980s, the Fluxus Gallery housed a number of international and national exhibitions organized by the Fluxus Group, self-described as an artistic protest group that sought to raise public reaction with their activities.20 Although short-lived, Fluxus put forward a sensationalist approach to art in the Turkish Cypriot community by adopting a rebellious stand against the status quo; in line with this, its gallery became one of the first spaces to incorporate new media such as installation and performance art and can be seen as forerunner to the next generation of artists. The HP Gallery, which can be seen as Fluxus’ successor, continued the group’s progressive views on art and sought to be a place that “would bring together artists and art lovers” as well as “promote the interest of the public towards art.”21 Encouraged by the growth of interest in art, other

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short-lived artist-run spaces like the Mentesh Art Gallery run by Ayhan Menteş (1985–95), Şinasi Tekman’s studio (1997), and the Bellapais Art Gallery, run by Aşık Mene (1998), operated as galleries, although their activities were not as innovative. The community, mainly in Nicosia, embraced visual art viewing, especially painting, and visibility of art through related print media became a part of everyday life.22 Despite all efforts, during the late 1990s investment into art and culture plummeted and privately funded spaces such as the HP Gallery were discouraged by rising rent prices, lack of financial support, and the unresolved Cyprus problem.23 In 2007, the gallery and cultural center Sidestreets was founded by Anber Onar and Johann Pillai in Nicosia. As its first major project, Sidestreets compiled a survey of artistic and cultural activities dating from 1979 to 2006.24 The research was prompted by a discussion between Turkish Cypriot artists, Emin Çizenel and Anber Onar, and cultural manager Rana Zincir, the latter two being openly skeptical about the accumulation of resources and activities in the field of visual art in north Cyprus. On his return to the island in the late 1970s, Çizenel had experienced and was part of the efforts and activities that had unfolded first hand during this seemingly barren period. However, for the most part, these were undocumented and in some cases entirely forgotten. From December 2006 to January 2008, Onar and Zincir conducted a detailed review of existing sources and invited individual artists, collectors, and institutions to share their archives. In turn, they collected a vast range of documents and ephemerae including posters, invitations, and banners with which they created a timeline of milestones in the fields of visual arts and theatre. This detailed review shed light on a segment of events and efforts in the recent art history of the Turkish Cypriot community, which had left traces of their existence in people’s memories—including Hüseyin Çağlayan’s Venice Biennale poster, posters of exhibitions held at now-defunct galleries, limited edition catalogues, proposals for the Logo Design competition held for the unrealized project Sarayönü Fine Arts Museum. These were ultimately presented in the exhibition titled Untitled History.25 Unfortunately, it was not accompanied by a catalogue or book publication, and remains dispersed and buried in individual archives and private collections. The exhibition importantly revealed the scarcity of publications and academic studies that record and examine such activities. Although sources are undeniably sparse and often monolingual, significantly this is not because of a lack of activities or history to document and examine, but rather due to a number of factors, such as the death of funding, investment into research positions, and the unstable political environment and social life that is embargoed by the international sphere. Western Modern movements and styles as well as the establishment of high art examples set in metanarratives are known for being supported and disseminated by large art institutions such as museums, major galleries, and collectors, as well as by art criticism.26 Although the idea of the single, unified subject speaking from one place with a sense of authority has been subject to postmodernist critique during the 1970s and 1980s, artistic practices in north Cyprus longed for and remained heavily influenced by modernist narratives. Issues raised by Untitled History not only acknowledged the need for scholarship and institutions/museums but also pointed to the function of the latter as mediators between art and the public: “In the absence of a museum, Turkish Cypriot citizens have no alternative means of accessing this aspect of their heritage.”27

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This was highlighted by Onar prior to the exhibition in 2005, who, as guest editor of the European Mediterranean Art Journal, stated that the Turkish Cypriot community was at a disadvantage because of the lack of a long-standing art establishment.

Contemporary Documentations: The Artist Interview In the twenty-first century, the increase in art’s visibility in mass culture can be seen as a direct consequence of the growing artistic scene. Although there were many young artists in training, few took up art history and criticism; therefore, despite a flurry of exhibitions and art activities, there was less writing on art. Since the late 1990s, alternative forms of documentation such as television, newspaper columns, and, more recently, social media have slowly dominated art writing and critical thought. The necessity to disseminate art news to a wider public became a primary concern for artists, and new ways of engaging viewers developed. In “Sanat Yaşantımız” (Our Artistic Lives) (1982), Cevdet Çağdaş expresses the wish for the continuation of art events to take place and for more people to engage with and view the arts.28 In a later essay, Çağdaş directs those who could not visit events in person to the television broadcast Bayrak Radio Television Corporation (BRTK) as an alternative to first-hand experience.29 After the adoption of print culture and photography, audiovisual video recordings have provided an unparalleled tool for twentieth-century art, popularized in the Western world, most notably by the infamous curator Hans Ulrich Olbrist’s high-profile project, The Interview Project—an ‘endless conversation’ started in 1996 that includes over 2,400 hours of interviews with leading cultural figures. The artist interview became a popular medium for interested parties to gain insight into the enigmatic world of artistic production.30 As early as 1988, Emin Çizenel wrote about the popularity of such alternative sources: “In recent years we hear interesting talk suggesting that visual media far outweighs printed matter.”31 By the end of the 1980s, television had become a familiar alternative to the written word and radio broadcasting. Soon enough, the Turkish Cypriot community would have its very own television program dedicated to art and culture. The television program Art Journal, produced and presented by Hakan Çakmak, is one of the earliest and longest-running examples of the recorded artist interview in the form of a cultural talk show broadcast on BRTK between 1991 and 2015. Since then, a number of other programs with an art and culture focus have emerged, yet Art Journal remains the most well-known and celebrated. Focusing mainly on local art and artists, it documented headlining events and exhibitions, conducted a vast number of interviews with artists, critics, and curators, and presented a series of narratives in the form of a dialogue on art for the Turkish-speaking community in Cyprus. The format of the program was initially based on cultural programs produced by the two major Turkish channels, TRT and NTV.32 Having trained in Turkey, Çakmak was very familiar with such shows and upon his return had the idea to adopt a similar structure to showcase Turkish Cypriot artists, who were included in the early set design, decoration and even the design of the opening segment of the show.33 Çakmak was also part of the art scene and was closely involved with the publication Culture-Art Review. Therefore,

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it is likely that Çakmak would have been aware of the interest in the artist interviews broadcast on television to which Çizenel had referred in his 1988 text.34 In its early days, the program was titled Gün Işığı (Daylight), reflecting what Çakmak himself describes as “a naive idealism to let art guide the society as light would guide us in the right path to enlightenment.”35 Çakmak later noted that he recognized the title represented an overly idealistic and populist view of art, nonetheless admitting that these were the driving forces behind its initial conception.36 There are elements in the presentation that heighten this effect, such as the consistent use of classical music as a backdrop to visual art as a means of elevation. Because of the high volume of events and the program’s limited time span, Çakmak as producer had to be selective in choosing events and artists to feature on the show and which to leave out. Metadiscursive announcements such as “This is all we have put together for you today” act as a reminder that the given information is construed by means of an editing process. Over twenty-four years and more than 700 programs, Art Journal has established a mold for talking about and interacting with visual art. Through the process of selection, the program becomes a critical platform for forming a mainstream, where a number of artists who are asked to/agree to step in front of the camera represent visual art in the community. Several names appear repeatedly, establishing their place in what can be referred to as a canon of reportage, whilst more elusive artists are bygone. In more recent shows, particularly in the 2010s, we can observe a contemporary generation disrupting the usual format of the program and revising it by changing the tone and environment of the dialogue.

Rethinking the Mold: Talking about the Way We Engage with Art From the 1980s’ golden age to the turn of the century, Turkish Cypriot art practices continued outside of institutionalized spaces, and the lack of established museums or similar institutional spaces was considered a disparity by many.37 Despite this, in the early twenty-first century new art associations were formed, such as the European Mediterranean Arts Association (EMAA) (2002). EMAA sought to explore new ways of engaging with the public, organizing exhibitions, workshops, and training programs open to all ages in various areas of plastic arts, exerting significant effort to documenting these in the form of catalogues and booklets. Artistic practices continued to flourish in an experimental manner; younger artists embraced the postmodern sensibility of being fragmented and formed rootless, almost nomadic collectives and hubs where they could come together and exchange ideas. These collectives openly embraced new media and practices in contemporary art. On December 27, 2013, an unnamed artistic collective of fifteen Turkish Cypriots organized a one-night exhibition entitled Happening at Sidestreets Gallery. The collective, which included Nurtane Karagil, Uğur Bahçeci, Naz Atun, İnal Bilsel, Ametis Ametis and Reşat Korel, Batu Palmer, Aycan Garip, Hatice Dörtlemez, and Anber Onar, represents part of a new generation of contemporary artists who have been actively taking issue with the conditions and environment of living in Cyprus. The event-based artworks such as interactive multimedia installations and performances sought to question the existing concepts

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or accepted norms in everyday life by bringing art to the street, and the passer-by into the gallery, opening a threshold between high and low cultural spaces. In her interview with Çakmak on Art Journal, participating artist Nurtane Karagil commented on the event: “People aren’t talking […] the environment we want to create with our art works are not only to get people to talk but also to get them to talk to each other about their thoughts on these works.”38 Art Journal ’s interviews from Happening bear a striking difference to the format of previous programs. In earlier episodes, the presenter introduces the line-up of the show; followed by illustrative visual recordings of mentioned exhibitions/performances/ recitals; these are then discussed in the interview segment with the artist/performer/ musician. The interviews mostly took place in the BRTK studio, where the presenter sat across from the guest addressing a series of questions. After purchasing a handheld camera, the interviews were occasionally conducted on-site in exhibitions. In these episodes, we hear the presenter asking questions from behind the camera (we do not see him, which arouses a feeling of his being on our side of the viewing experience). The presenter-producer Çakmak describes his interviews as informal conversations in the form of a casual exchange.39 Although these dialogues often appear spontaneous, many artists recall Çakmak coming prepared with notes or a list of questions designed to open up the discussion and give artists the chance to talk about their works.40 In these earlier programs, the artist and the interlocutor took turns in acting as the single authorial voice that narrated the program, whilst the viewer was the passive receiver of information. Happening posed a unique challenge to Art Journal, as it was a one-night temporary event, it did not offer a venue as a place for recording. Further disrupting the usual format of the show, Karagil and Bahçeci recall insisting on the interview taking place somewhere other than the usual set in the BRTK studios.41 Ultimately, the resulting interview forces the program to take place outside of its usual format. Significantly, we neither see nor hear any questions from Çakmak. Instead, individual contributors speak directly to the camera, and as a result directly to the audience (Figure 2.2). The interviews in Art Journal place the artists in the role of the author of the reportage as well as the mediator between artwork and audience. Importantly, this voice is not singular, but plural—taking on multiple identities and stories, told through a polyphonic presentation. As well as its documentation in Art Journal, the format of Happening can be considered aberrant in itself; presenting a collection of event- and time-based art forms such as site-specific interactive installations, performances, and video/sound-art. Speaking on behalf of the artistic collective, Karagil notes that the purpose of Happening was to make artworks accessible and encourage engagement: “What we need in Cyprus right now is not ‘high art’; it’s more suitable if we had artwork that is more understandable and can be commented upon viewing.”42 Happening was the first of three events, followed by Etkenlik (Effectiveness) (2014) and Son Kullanim Tarihi (SKT) (Expiration Date) (2016). Effectiveness was a one-night video exhibition, where artists voiced similar concerns more directly, beginning with its ironic title. Playing on the word etkinlik (happening/event) and critically referring to previous exhibition(s) that were passively viewed and later forgotten, Effectiveness meant to activate a reaction in its audiences, to create a lasting effect that would get people to speak and respond. Stating their objectives, the collective noted: “We want to

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Figure 2.2  Nurtane Karagil discussing Happening, December 27, 2013, on Sanat Güncesi (Art Journal). Copyright © BRTK. Courtesy of BRTK. Source: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=prpTpDPvVQ8.

Figure 2.3  Ugur Bahceci discussing Happening, December 27, 2013, on Sanat Güncesi (Art Journal). Copyright © BRTK. Courtesy of BRTK. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prp TpDPvVQ8.

move away from general terms like ‘good or interesting’ […] it would be much more useful to understand what message we are sending to our audience.”43 The collective’s call for the public to be part of this dialogue aims not only to elicit a response to whether they simply like or dislike the art, but also to stimulate a deeper reflection on what their exchange entails. The 2013 and 2014 events and participating artists’ wider practices constitute examples from recent years that confront individual and collective experiences and the consequences of living in Cyprus. These subjects are explored and communicated through various media and made subject to experiments with noninstitutional spaces of display, such as public streets or domestic areas.44 Previous examples of performance-based interactive approaches to art in alternative spaces can be observed in the early 2000s like the series of public performances and installations by Anber Onar, Interruptions (2001) and Outside the Projects (2005). Onar’s work can be viewed as a precursor to later practices, although they are more radical examples of how art can arouse political and social reactions by moving into the street, into everyday life and outside the gallery. Onar, who also took part in Happening, recalls the event as “an unexpected presentation of works in a gallery environment where art works are expected to have a certain quality and format, [thus] their reading as artworks was difficult and ambiguous for the public.” Onar added that “the lack of aftermath discussions was disappointing, although the artists’ desire to insist on a dialogue was very important.”45 Since 2014, the artistic collective has continued, involving new participants like Meray Diner, Rahme Veziroglu, Sinem Ertaner, Toya Akpinar, Umay Yilmaz, and Vassilis Vassiliou. Bakhtin’s concepts such as “polyphony,” “dialogic,” and “heteroglossia,” broadly defined as the presence of two or more expressed viewpoints in a text or other artistic work, maintain its contemporary relevance and the ability to “make visible features of a literary or other work previously unseen.”46 Happening and subsequent events did not only seek to reach a wider audience by using interactive media, but also attempted to arouse engagement that resulted in some form of response. With the role of social

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media and heightened connectedness in the twenty-first century, contemporary debates have declared the role of the critic in wider Western contemporary art as absolute. Nonetheless, even in contemporary practices, there is still a deliberate call for and desired expectation for a “response,” in the form of critical engagement, alongside a willingness to take part in the canon of reportage, however alternative. Current with the international shift in twenty-first-century contemporary practices, there is a growing emphasis on audience engagement and accessibility in north Cyprus, which differs from the previous generations’ preoccupation with a sustainable representation and preservation of Turkish Cypriot art and culture. Taking over the single authoritative voice, the artistic collective’s call for response is akin to dialogic exchange; however, the degree and level of interaction are notably limited and therefore its results ambiguous.

Concluding Remarks Since the mid-twentieth century, the lives of the Turkish Cypriot community as a people on the island can be characterized as fragmented—affected by several factors and influences, both ethnographically and politically, in forming an identity, as well as being dislocated geographically. The periods leading up to and after the 1974 events were devastating to all the island’s ethnic groups and can be seen as a major setback that disabled the population’s ability to flourish to its full capacity in all areas of life. Nonetheless, however fragmented life has been for the Turkish Cypriot community, the level of creativity in relation to the size of the population is noteworthy. As demonstrated by compilations like Untitled History, despite communal strife, artistic practices prevailed and continue to develop through individual and collective efforts. This study, focusing on discussions around art in the Turkish Cypriot community that have accumulated after the division of the island, outside of the Republic of Cyprus and traditional forms of art-historical documentation, is a glimpse into the largely unknown artistic life of the community and some of the changes it underwent. Despite an ever-growing number of artists, events, and exhibitions, art-historical scholarship has failed to keep up, ending up a seemingly barren discipline. From the late 1990s onwards, writing on art activities in print media has been slowly dominated by alternative forms of documentation, such as television programs, newspaper columns, and, more recently, internet-based forums and social media, which have endured as the only consistent form of collecting the present and archiving the past. Whilst in canonical Western art history artistic reception is dependent on a culture of art-historical narratives and criticism (based on reading, writing, and looking), the reception of contemporary art practices in the Turkish Cypriot community has developed by means of alternative methods, namely reportage (rooted in listening and responding), thus forming a canon of reportage, one that must be carefully reviewed and critically considered.

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Over a short period of forty years, there have been notable changes in the production and display of and access to art. Identifying where to begin to understand these changes is comparable to observing the global transformation of institutional spaces—the rise in the number of artist-run and private galleries that question the significance of this as spaces of learning and authority. In addition to these, the (stereotypical) identity of the artist is also evolving, causing a rift between the standards of art viewing and younger practitioners whose practices taken up a seemingly dialogic (as opposed to narrational) engagement with viewers, expanding its interest in not only storytelling, but also in experience-sharing.47 As this chapter has shown, the stories behind art practices are hidden in fragmentary, alternative forms of documentation such as newspapers, journals, and recorded television programs have helped form an apparent canon of reportage that is inherently partial and far from being comprehensive. Therefore, the sources outlined here, and the way we talk about contemporary art in Cyprus, are to show that there is as much waiting to be heard, acknowledged, and responded to on record, as there is off record. The hundreds of artist interviews recorded in Art Journal, the numerous projects carried out by private and artist-led spaces, and the thousands of exhibitions and individual artworks in collections can be observed as localized narratives, petit recits that can potentially throw off grand narratives. The paradigm shift that occurs within such formations demarcates the parameters of distinguishable binaries between pre- and post-twenty-first-century practices with emphasis on permanence/temporality, individualism/collectivism, the representation of a nation or entity/plurality, rootedness/up rootedness, and democracy/liberalism/socialism. The dialectics of such binaries can be misleading, obstructing our views into reading between the lines.48

Notes 1 2 3 4

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [1979], trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays [1934], ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981). Robert T. Craig, “How We Talk about How We Talk: Communication Theory in the Public Interest,” Journal of Communication 55, no. 4 (December 2005): 659–67. These physical records are held at the AKM National Library, Nicosia. See also AhmetAn, Kibris Turk Kulturu Uzerine Yazilar (Nicosia: Kivilcim Yayinlar, No: 5, 1999): 37–41; PierreOberling, The Heart of a Nation: A History of Turkish Cypriot Culture 1571–2001 (Nicosia: Rustem, 2007), 119–230; ErtuğrulAydın, “Kıbrıs Türk Dergiciliği,” Yeni Turk Edebiyati Arastirmalar 4, no. 8 (2012): 159–72; CevdetÇağdaş, “Olay Sanat’ Eki,” Sanat Yazıları (Nicosia: Görsel Santçılar Derneği, 1982), 29–30.

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LaneRelyea, “After Criticism,” in Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present, ed. AlexanderDumbadze and SuzanneHudson (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 357–66. 6 Oberling, The Heart of a Nation, 75. 7 Ibid., 75. 8 Çağdaş, Sanat Yazıları, 9–10. 9 Kıbrıs Sanat Dergisi (1981–2) was founded and owned by Timur Öztürk. Çağdaş, Cevdet, “Kıbrıs Sanat Dergisi,” in Sanat Yazıları, 58. Other short-lived yet influential journals are Sanat/Yazın (1979) and Karanfil (1981). For a history of journals and magazines published between the years 1920 and 1973, see Bülent Fevzioğlu, “Tarihsel yolculukta dergilerimiz,” Adres Kıbrıs 7, no. 339 (October 29, 2017): 16–20. See also Ertuğrul Aydın, “Kıbrıs Türk Dergiciliği,” Yeni Türk Edebiyatı Araştırmaları 8, no. 4 (July–December 2012): 159–72. 10 Mehmet Hasgüler, Kıbrıs’ta Enosis ve Taksim Politikalarının Sonu (Ankara: İletişim Yayınları, 2000); Niyazi Kızılyürek, Milliyetçilik Kıskacında Kıbrıs (Ankara: İletişim Yayınları, 2002); Vamık Volkan, Killing in the Name of Identity: A Study of Bloody Conflicts (Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone Publishing, 2006). 11 Çağdaş, Sanat Yazıları, 60. See also Oberling, The Heart of a Nation, 121. 12 Çağdaş, Sanat Yazıları, 60. 13 Niyazi Kizilyurek, Bir Hinc ve Siddet Tarihi: Kibris’ta Statu Kavgasi ve Etnik Catisma (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi Universitesi Yayinlari, 2016); Oberling, The Heart of a Nation, 153–92; “Milliyetcilik/ΕΘΝΙΚΙΣΜΟΣ/Nationalism,” in Kibris Yazilari, ed. N. Kizilyurek, Issue 13, 2011. 14 “Kanıtlasınlar, gelsinler, görsünler ve yazsınlar. Kendimizi biz anlatmayalım,” Çağdaş, “Bana göre sanatımız nerededir?” ibid., 61. 15 Oberling, The Heart of a Nation, 153–92 16 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 262–3. 17 Relyea, “After Criticism,” 362. 18 Notably Çağdaş Sanatcilar Dernegi (Çağ-Der) founded in 1979 by Yaşar Ersoy. Between the years 1981 and 1985, the Nicosia Art and Culture Festival became an important event where artists and performers could present their works to the public. This was organized by Çağ-Der in collaboration with the Nicosia Municipality and the support of former Mayor Mustafa Akıncı. Other important organizations are Görsel Sanatçılar Derneği and Kıbrıs Sanat Derneği, both established in the early 1980s. 19 Çağdaş, Sanat Yazıları, 9. 20 Kültür Sanat Dergisi 1 (1985), 3. 21 İnatçı, Ümit, “Institutionalization in the arts,” recorded panel discussion, February 5, 2008. A panel included Ergün Olgun representing Fluxus Gallery, İlker Nevzat representing HP Gallery and Ümit İnatçı representing the Cyprus Arts Association. 22 Nevzat, İlker, ibid. 23 This later expanded to be more inclusive, featuring exhibitions of sculpture, ceramics, caricature, and photography. Kültür Sanat Dergisi 1, 3. See also Cevdet Çağdaş’ short series “Kıbrıs Turk Resmi: Bügünlere gelişin öyküsü” in Kültür Sanat Dergisi, issues 1–5, which provides a brief yet accessible source on Turkish Cypriot painting from the 1940s to the early 1980s. 5

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24 “Culture Art Conventions” were organized by the Department of Culture to discuss the issues and developments in the field. Three conventions were held; the first of which took place on March 3–6, 1998, the second on May 21–5, 2001, and the last on April 3–7, 2006. See AKM National Library, Nicosia. 25 Sidestreets Culture (2007–14). See website at http://www.sidestreets.org/ (accessed June 12, 2017). 26 Untitled History (January 30–February 16, 2008), pamphlet handout, Sidestreets Culture. Available at http://www.sidestreets.org/ (accessed June 12, 2017). 27 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. 28 A. Onar, “From the Editor,” EMAA Art Journal 4, no. 1 (October 2005): 1. 29 Çağdaş, Sanat Yazıları, 10. 30 Ibid., 34. BRTK is the Turkish Cypriot community’s first radio and television broadcasting corporation established in 1963. 31 Popularity of podcasts is increasing, taken up by major art institutions such as MoMA (MoMA Talks), TATE (TateShots), SFMoMA (Raw Material), IMA (ItsMyArt), Gagosian Gallery (GAG), ART21. 32 Çizenel is referring to a tele-interview with jazz pianist Keith Jarett that aired on TRT. Kültür Sanat Dergisi 8 (1988): 10. 33 Current programmes include “Arşiv Sanat” (Art Archive) directed by Canan Kerestecioğlu and Özlem Bülbül, which is a weekly digest that looks at programs from the 1970s and 1980s on TRT. Others include “Gündem Kültür Sanat” (Current Culture Art) and “Kültür Sanat” (Culture Art). “Gece Gündüz,” which includes a broader range of cultural topics, is a popular show on NTV. 34 Ümit İnatçı’s (2000s) earlier artistic collaborations were with Nilgun Güney and Aşık Mene. 35 Çizenel, Emin, Kültür Sanat Dergisi 8, 10. 36 Interview with Hakan Çakmak, BRTK Studios, Nicosia, November 16, 2015. 37 Ibid. All sources in BRTK archive and online database, as well as YouTube channel (in Turkish). 38 Several culture-art conferences and newspaper columns have been dedicated to this issue; most recently the MAKYA (June 7, 2017) workshop on museums, archives, and libraries. 39 Karagil, Nurtane, interview in Sanat Güncesi (2014), [Television Program] BRTK, January 9. 40 Interview with Hakan Çakmak, BRTK Studios, Nicosia, November 16, 2015. 41 Ibid. 42 Interview wıth Nurtane Karagil and Uğur Bahçeci, Nicosia, 2016. As a result, the interview was recorded in Ghetto Cafe Bar, Nicosia, in front of Nurtane Karagil’s chalk wall drawing. 43 Karagil, Nurtane, interview in Sanat Güncesi (2014), [Television Program] BRTK, January 9. 44 Another earlier example of collective exhibition recorded by Art Journal is Birartıbır (2011). There are a number of new private and artist-run spaces such as Kuruceşme Gallery, TaşEv, and SOL Exhibition Hall in Nicosia; Art Rooms Gallery and Onbironbir in Kyrenia; and Pikadilli in Famagusta. 45 Interview with Anber Onar, Ghetto Café Bar, Nicosia, June 1, 2017.

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46 Patricia Waugh, ed., Literary Theory and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 225. 47 Here, younger practitioners are not only fine art graduates or even necessarily trained, but are computer engineers, sociologists, architects, historians, film producers, and political scientists. 48 This chapter is dedicated to Hakan Çakmak, who we unexpectedly lost in 2017. Many thanks to those who have contributed to my writing this chapter, notably the editors of the book, Alev Adil, Uğur Bahçeci, Cevdet Çağdaş, Emin Çizenel, Ümit İnatçı, Nurtane Karagil, Anber Onar, and Aytuğ Fazil Plümer. A special thanks to Mehmet Ratip, for his critical input and for our endless dialogues.

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Becoming and Being a Visual Artist in the Republic of Cyprus: The Prominence of the Artist-Identity Niki Zanti-Philiastides

What does it mean to be—or to become—a visual artist in Cyprus? How does one identify with this social group and how is meaning shared? In the international academic literature, the notion of the artist-identity has been deconstructed primarily from a sociological perspective that views the artist-identity as emerging from the collective perception of what it means to be an artist.1 From this point of view, the artist-identity is learned through myths and stereotypes that “provide ready-made stories of the self that become a vital source of information about what it means to be a professional visual artist and how that identity can be appropriately expressed to others.”2 Approached from an art-historical perspective, charting the stylistic progress made by artists, artist-identity relates to an artist’s conscious efforts to establish a personal artistic style, or character, in order to distinguish from other artists.3 In this sense, artistic production is viewed as a reflection of the artist-identity. But the artistidentity still remains in the periphery of debates concerning the living and working situation of artists. The opposite also stands; the latter are seldom reflected in research on the artist-identity. My main concern in this chapter is to provide an understanding of the artist-identity in Cyprus, with reference to the dynamics that influences it. Furthermore, explored from artists’ own point of view, I examine the impact this identity has on their behavior and decisions. Considering that “perceptions” and “identities” are both the outcomes of situations and elements that contribute to the modeling of behavior, my aim here is to expand our understanding of artists’ plans and actions, as well as the self-imposed parameters of their artistic production as they relate to the artist-identity. Before moving forward into this discussion, let us step back in time. Visual artistic production in Cyprus has been considered a field of art-historical study and exhibition only since the beginning of the twentieth century. Danos suggests that it emerged within the conditions of colonialism and flowered in the post-independence era.4 With the transfer of modernist European ideas—either by traveling artists of various European

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nationalities and their artistic explorations of Cyprus5 or, to some extent, by “first generation” Cypriot artists who studied abroad and gave impetus to the development of a local visual art scene—a site-specific artistic vocabulary developed that integrated a wide range of artistic traditions and contemporary expressions.6 However, in contrast to the rest of Europe, where artistic training and scholarly discourse started to become formalized in the seventeenth century, there was no tradition of art academies on the island; instead, there was a noted absence of informed art criticism. The society was still predominantly rural and traditional then, and the art discourse that accompanied international art production was too hermetic for the broader Cypriot audience to be able to appreciate. Since then, artistic production has had to adapt to changing environments and conditions created by the British rule (which lasted until 1960), the country’s subsequent independence (1960), the Turkish invasion (1974), the EU accession (2004), and the recent fluctuations in economic conditions (early 2000s till today). By 2014, the unstable financial situation had affected the local art market, which was still underdeveloped, and brought a number of commercial galleries at risk of closure. Individual and institutional activity, which had been heavily dependent on state funding due to the absence of viable funding alternatives from the private sector, experienced its own recession. However, by 2017 there had been several noteworthy developments in the visual arts. Private universities that had created departments of applied arts in previous years introduced undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in the visual arts with the first cohort graduating in 2014. In 2015, the University of Technology, one of the three state universities in the Republic of Cyprus, introduced a postgraduate program of studies in art history and later developed an undergraduate program in fine art. Meanwhile, several artist-led project spaces were set up, and some commercial galleries and art institutions initiated new ways to engage the public with their programs. Artists’ associations encountered difficulties funding their exhibition programs but they made several advancements in regard to advocacy and representation. In addition, several Cypriot art collectors started setting up private museums to display their collections— there are now four new private museums open to the public, displaying classical, modern, and contemporary European art, as well as works by Cypriot artists. It was within this context that I became interested in exploring artistic production in Cyprus and in understanding visual artists’ experiences and behavior. In this chapter, the discussion on the artist-identity is grounded in an empirical study undertaken in 2011–15 and developed further until 2017. In-depth interviews were conducted with twenty-six visual artists and ten art-professionals living and working in the Republic of Cyprus.7 The sample was diverse in terms of age,8 gender,9 location,10 educational background,11 and activity in the field, representing an array of experiences and perspectives. In order to capture the diversity of professional artistic production on the island, the sample consisted of artists who showed a commitment to fine art (both as a central life activity and as a publicly proclaimed profession), who had exhibited professionally in solo or group shows, who had spent more than one year in professional practice, and who held a fine art degree from a higher education institution. The data collected from the interviews were enriched with additional

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data from memos,12 observations,13 policy documents, and the extant literature. The methodology guidelines14 and methodological decisions made throughout the research allowed the grounded theory to gradually develop from the data. The interpretations that follow rely on the visual artists’ thoughts on their experiences—these are acknowledged as subjective representations of their “reality,” constructed through an exchange between each participant and myself. I also recognize that the information shared through this process is already an interpretation, and I am therefore cautious not to convey it as the “truth.” The aim here is to explore the artists’ meanings within the specific social context, rather than to generate statistical generalizations or represent specific artistic personalities. Insights from interviews with visual artists and other individuals from the sector contributed to the development of a theoretical framework describing the structure of the artist-identity, from which certain theoretical generalizations and logical inferences have been made possible. After prompting artists to talk about how they came to become artists, most of them responded through a narrative framework that followed a sequential pattern, providing a sense of continuity to otherwise isolated events. Artists contextualized their accounts by describing their experiences in relation to time and space; for example, they interpreted their early experiences of learning how to draw by referring to particular moments in their childhood when they realized they distinguished from others for being able to do it well, and situated these events within a specific social, cultural, or institutional environment where they interacted with other individuals, such as their teachers, their peers, or their family circle. I listened intently as artists described childhood events that they considered to be significant to their later advancement. The majority of visual artists claimed that their inclination to art stemmed from within, not as a hereditary gene but as a mysteriously innate element that they believe lies outside the domain of science or nature. One visual artist described his proclivity to art as an “internal calling,” stating that “there is something inside [him] that is calling [him], that screams for [him], a calling, an internal calling.”15 This calling is depicted as a very intense, almost unavoidable consequence of his being. Another remarked that this was how he was born. He continued: I don’t have a start date, I remember since primary school, since secondary school, I did some things which if I judge them now they were artistic tendencies, it was since primary school, even though I never did painting as an art subject in primary school.16

The artist implied that since he exhibited signs of talent without prior artistic training, his inclination to art would be regarded as innate—an inborn, natural ability that he must have “brought with [him].”17 Several visual artists reinterpreted (seemingly inconsequential) events in their early childhood as indications of innate “artistic tendencies.” These cases bolster the artists’ perceptions that being an artist is not an obtained characteristic but an intrinsic one. To support this, the visual artists I spoke with were often vague about how art first became part of their lives, indicating that they have “always been into the arts,”18 that they were “always interested in art,”19 and

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that “art was always stronger in anything [they] did.”20 One artist maintained that it is her purpose in life to be an artist, stating that she “must be on this planet to paint.”21 As observed in these narratives, the majority of visual artists intensely believe that they were born with the ability or talent to create art and that creating works of art offers a sort of existential satisfaction that could not be obtained doing anything else. A number of artists asserted that their affections for art were evoked by being nurtured in an artistic environment. In some cases, a person from their immediate familial circle contributed to their creative development; one artist stated that “[her] father is also an artist, so [art] was something which was in [her] life since [she] was born.”22 Another artist explained how his uncle, who is a painter, unlocked the creativity that he had been predisposed to, and which he believes had been “inside” him.23 In several cases, teachers had been instrumental to the advancement of the artist’s talent. As one artist asserted: When she saw me drawing, and saw that I did it well, she took me by the hand every morning and brought me to school, I sat on a desk and began drawing— before the normal age for school […] and so since then I had this passion and love for painting.24

Here, the artist makes three statements: first, she had exhibited some characteristics of talent at a very young age, before any formal instruction. Second, she underwent a turning point through meeting a teacher who acknowledged this talent and encouraged it. The third statement refers to the artist’s realization or understanding of this turning point in her life, like an epiphany,25 which helped her develop a passion for art. This narrative bears similarities with the narratives of many other artists I spoke with who believe that the contribution of a teacher, a mentor, or a family member assisted in their artistic development. In addition, almost all visual artists expressed their belief that their choice of profession and the development of their artistic career were serendipitous. In their narratives, they wavered between their beliefs that their choices were “coincidental,”26 “lucky,”27 and “timely,”28 and their conviction that these occurrences were part of a “greater plan.” One artist described a series of synchronies in his life that led him to become an artist which, in retrospect, appeared to be too meaningful to ignore.29 He explained that in the 1960s, when he graduated from high school, he started painting as a pastime and exhibited his work with other self-taught artists. An officer from the Ministry of Education and Culture saw his work, and encouraged him to take up engraving, a technique that the artist was not familiar with at the time. Fortunately, the officer provided him with the necessary materials because he did not have the means to purchase them himself. According to the artist, he was only given one indication regarding the technique but he experimented with the materials almost religiously. The timing of this life event was considered significant because a few months later he would inadvertently be introduced to one of the most renowned engravers from Greece, exhibiting in Cyprus for the first time. Having produced a considerable amount of work, the engraver would recognize his potential and would invite him to Greece as an apprentice; there, he would develop his skills and gain a deep understanding of the

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discipline. He would then obtain a degree in fine arts and return to Cyprus to continue his professional practice. He would go on to experience many other difficulties in his art practice, but each would contribute to his development. The artist asked me to recognize that if even one of these events had not occurred at that specific time, his life might have been different. While he used words such as “chance,” “luck,” and “fortune,” it was often implied that these instances were actually an act of “fate.” I argue that beliefs such as the ones described in the paragraphs above are pivotal in the development of a foundation for the artist-identity. Is it possible that artists dwell on these facets of their lives because such narratives are symbols of artistic identification30 and therefore offer some sort of ontological security? Soussloff, whose research explored the historiography, theory, and philosophy of art in the European tradition, located numerous commonalities in artist’s stories by looking into records of artists’ biographies from fifteenth-century Florence to nineteenth-century Germany— the birthplace of the discipline of art history in its academic form—and then to earlytwentieth-century Vienna.31 From this process, she created a common narrative for artists, often based on anecdotes, which she believes still shapes people’s perceptions and ideas about the lives of artists today. Emerging from the biographical schematic of artists’ lives, are these “ready-made stories of the [artist’s] self,”32 or as Bain calls them, a priori narratives?33 These stories or narratives form the artist myth, a Western cultural concept, according to which the artist is an individual who exhibited an early talent in the arts, often considered to be natural or God-given; who might have been acknowledged for this gift and encouraged by a teacher; who is passionate, independent, radical, and selflessly devoted to their work; who needs to create in isolation from the world; and who produces unique and sublime works of art that are divorced from any utilitarian or commercial values.34 This pattern reads familiar with the narratives expressed by artists I had spoken with, and raises questions regarding the selection of life experiences they chose to share with me. Considering the commonalities, it seems plausible that, subconsciously, artists internalize these prescribed narratives and recall particular instances from their lives that provide confirmation of them, while guarding against instances that could constitute a discrepancy.35 Some artists do not recognize—or may choose not to—that their career experiences, these seemingly random occurrences that became catalysts in their development as artists, have been the outcomes of their own choices, and perhaps more importantly, of incredibly hard work. Instead, these narratives indicate a degree of shared meaning about inborn talent and drive. Røyseng et al. argue that “the belief in the gift of grace seems anachronistic and difficult to defend.”36 Would research on the occupational identity of mathematicians, physicians, or academics illustrate something different? Even if it did, a number of historians would be against the supposition that an individual’s “talent” can be recognized early and unequivocally; many “great” artists, and indeed many revered first-generation Cypriot artists, chose their career late in life and a number of children who exhibited talent in art at an early age never emerged as artists. The inner logic of these synchronies and coincidences asks for a resolution, which cannot be satisfactorily reached unless we adopt this transcendent viewpoint. Artists believe that the seemingly inconsequential events in their lives, the detailed unfolding of which only an omniscient narrator would know, still play a mysterious role in their current

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and future activities. Although these events are not always positive, they ultimately tend to be favorable for the artists and the development of their artistic production. Why is the reproduction of the myth so prevalent in Cyprus still? Although creative expression on this island had historically been influenced by both “Western” and “Eastern” cultures, allowing us to speak about a site-specific, hybrid artistic language,37 artistic production today has been purportedly constructed according to modernist ideals and values consumed and adopted during the British colonialism and in the process of assimilating with the European Union.38 The perception of the artistidentity developed by visual artists living and working in Cyprus is likely the result of their exposure to the intellectual and artistic movements of the “West” during their educational pursuits in European capitals. Artists possibly feel inclined to meet the cultural expectations that—they believe—are tied to this specific role, and adhere to culturally pre-defined, and often outdated, behaviors attached to their role as artists in order to build their artist-identity upon a familiar convention. As previously mentioned, in the absence of a tradition of art academies on the island until recently, all artists in this sample had studied art in higher education institutions abroad. During their studies, they developed their practical skills, gained knowledge of art theory, and learnt how to expand their way of thinking through consistent selfevaluation of their work. Artists tended toward self-directed methods of learning; they worked independently and spent a lot of time alone producing their art. As art students, they predominantly relied on individual supervision and peer support that they described as a contemplative, absorptive learning process with a strong constructive outcome, a method of learning that afforded them a high level of personal autonomy over their work. A number of artists went on to study at a postgraduate and doctorate level. Each school’s artistic influences and the country’s cultural stimulants are visible, particularly in artists’ early work. As a result, there has been an interesting heterogeneity in regard to artistic creation and conceptual thinking on the island. After graduating, the majority of visual artists returned to Cyprus within a year, with some exceptions of artists who stayed abroad for some period, working as creative practitioners and developing their networks. Concurrently, while back in their home environment, they maintained professional links abroad and continued to participate in further training programs, conferences, residencies, and international exhibitions. When artists returned to Cyprus after a considerable amount of time abroad, they experienced a readjustment period that can be compared to reverse culture shock.39 One artist explained how she had traveled from Germany to Scotland, to Iceland, and then to England for consecutive three-month residencies, before spending a year in the Netherlands obtaining a postgraduate degree. She then returned to Cyprus and was appointed a teaching position in a public high school, which she accepted because of her immediate need to start procuring an income. Comparing Cyprus to where she had previously lived and worked, she stated that elsewhere “things were totally different and people were much more open,” acknowledging that she “liked the people and their way of life.”40 The artist elucidated that “when [she] came back to Cyprus [she] was horrified.”41 She referred to herself as someone who “came from outer space,”42 alienated from her home culture and unacknowledged by the local artistic community. She had “dreadlocks in [her] hair, baggy pants and earrings” and due to

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her appearance and the way people confronted her, she “struggled during [her] first year in Cyprus.”43 In addition to experiencing a lack of confirmation of her prominent identity, that is, who she had become as an artist, she had to assume a role that required her to prioritize her teaching-identity over her artist-identity. The majority of artists I had spoken to appeared to have found themselves in a similar indeterminate state of discomfort when they first returned to Cyprus. The analysis and interpretation of visual artists’ transitional experiences suggest that the societal structures and norms that artists encountered upon their return to Cyprus challenged their artist-identities. Artists returned to Cyprus having formed some expectations of their home culture, based on their experiences during their time abroad. They pointed out that in Northern Europe, Germany, and France, cultural practitioners are recognized as distinct and valued professionals, and their status is acknowledged by the social systems. However, as argued earlier, contrary to perceived ideas, the conditions in Cyprus differ enormously from Western European countries. The disparities between artists’ expectations and their new experiences were associated with high levels of discontent and disappointment. They experienced a sense of loss as they realized that the social status they enjoyed in the country to which they had traveled was not recognized in Cyprus and their newly formed artist-identity was in “crisis.” The reactions of artists varied, depending on the cultural similarity between the foreign and home culture, the activity and the length of time they spent abroad, as well as the social relationships they had created with other artists and associates. For example, artists with institutional validation from major museums or commercial success in art galleries abroad distinguished themselves as individuals who did not adhere to the local social structure. Rather than fully assimilating, they operated within the global context and considered themselves “international artists.” Those who did not enjoy such validation employed different coping strategies to counterbalance their negative emotions. A number of artists deprecated government policies and professional associations for not providing adequate support and rejected cultural professionals for being unable to appreciate their art. Others created idealistic portraits of the social structures they wished for, and insisted that unless their expectations were met, they would abstain from the interaction altogether. In their frustration and disillusionment and before they were able to offset their emotional states, many visual artists sought to “escape” again and would go abroad for further training, residencies, or exhibitions. Each return became more bewildering than the previous one. The recurrence of these experiences reaffirmed artists’ negative perceptions and compounded their impact. Theoretically, with time and personal reflection, these artists will have become more tolerant and more accepting of their home culture or they will have expanded their art practice beyond the confines of the island enough to gain the validation they desire from an international sphere. An additional threat to the artist-identity is the plurality of professional identities, reluctantly adopted by artists as a means of financial security. Several artists working as creative practitioners pursued employment as teachers, curators, art writers, costume designers, or commercial photographers. For some artists, their choice to obtain secondary employment meant that they had to negotiate, and sometimes oppose,

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valued aspects of the artist-identity—independence, authenticity, selflessness. For several artists, secondary employment implied a significant time sacrifice to their primary artistic practice, and demanded a lot of energy that detracted from the time they could spend experimenting, producing, and promoting their artwork. One of the young visual artists I spoke with considered her personal work to be “the most important part of [herself], rather than the fact that [she] teaches.”44 She asserted that she would always consider herself an artist rather than an art teacher. Another artist maintained: “I have time left to do my art, which is more important […] when I put the two together I consider [art] more important than what I offer, or what I can offer in education.”45 A third artist explained how “[he] left [his] job, went home, closed everything else, and [he became] the engraver,”46 distinctly separating his two roles. The majority of artists identified themselves first and foremost as visual art practitioners—whilst they considered their secondary employment a necessity, they valued it lower than their artistic outputs. Their art practice would always take precedence over other occupational roles, hence they compartmentalized their life, both mentally and emotionally, so as to distinguish their work from their profession. McCall and Simmons identified three factors that influence the placement of an identity in the prominence hierarchy—the first factor related to self-support or support received from others for an identity claimed, the second was linked to an individual’s commitment toward a particular identity, and the third was connected to the extrinsic and intrinsic rewards obtained when evoking a certain identity.47 In the case of visual artists, it seems that other occupational roles received more support from the milieu, in the form of acknowledgment and status, and more extrinsic rewards, particularly monetary rewards and financial security. Still, artists’ deeper commitment to their artist-identity offers it a hierarchical position. This hierarchy reflects artists’ priorities and an attitudinal resistance against adopting an interdisciplinary identity. Inevitably, this hierarchy leads their actions across situations and over time. One such action is the establishment of a studio space. Whether working exclusively on their art practice or combining their practice with other forms of employment, all artists continued to experiment and develop their personal artistic style in order to establish their role, medium, and function in the art scene. Most of them created a studio space to work on their practice, which became a sign of status, commitment, and belonging to the profession. The majority of visual artists stated that in order to sustain their artistic production, it was necessary to isolate themselves in a “confined studio space”48 and that this was the only way they could produce quality work. One artist affirmed: “There are moments that I want to be by myself—to let my imagination run wild.”49 She explained that the creation process is often a “very solo experience”50 and believes that her creative output depends on that solitude. Another artist stated: “I want my moments, my time, to isolate myself in my studio, I have that introspection, working on my own.”51 Visual artists portrayed their studio as a mystical place where they become immersed into their practice, “a fertile place”52 and “a sacred space” where “no one enters.”53 Other activities were excluded from the studio and seldom were other people allowed to enter the space uninvited. The existence of a permanent creative space seemed to provide artists not only with isolation and privacy but also, and most importantly, with consistency and structure, contributing substantially to their

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self-conception as artists. Other participants affirmed that it was appropriate for an active artist to have a studio because it conferred a certain status; as one artist explained, “it can be awkward […] bringing a professional into a space, which is effectively your home […] somebody perceives that they need to see me in a studio, or else, you know, I’m not filling the blank. You know, then that’s a big problem, it’s a big problem.”54 She felt that artists were expected to have a studio space, a perception that had been reaffirmed by members of the local art scene. It appears that visual artists acquired studios not only for the practical purpose of producing art, but also as a deliberate strategy for reinforcing, to themselves and to others, a commitment to their visual art practice. The studio is therefore perceived as a significant component of the artist’s professional persona; consequently, it performs a valuable role in sustaining their artist-identity. Meanwhile, artists believe that their work’s value is reflected in the years of consistent sales, evidenced by their inclusion in renowned collections, confirmed by exhibitions of their work in museums and validated by their participation in national and international exhibitions and competitions. These factors are indicators of the principles or standards based on which the artists I had spoken with negotiate the boundaries of the visual art profession. They also mark certain identity standards set by artists and verified by other professionals in the art scene. Artists invested effort and time on building their reputation and validating their practice by participating in group exhibitions in art centers and galleries in Cyprus and abroad. They also participated in exhibitions organized by artists’ associations and other cultural institutions. They developed an extensive body of independent work while they grew their ever-changing professional network. Their standing amongst art writers, art galleries, curators, and collectors strengthened over time. Almost all artists pursued a solo exhibition with their regional gallery, and the State Department of Cultural Services had purchased at least one of their works of art.55 Most artists had a combined activity in the local and international art-scenes, exhibiting in both “commercial” art galleries and “non-commercial” art venues—striking a balance between the two was significant to them. Lehman and Wickham observed that it is “important for visual artists to establish relationships with art galleries and to build their legitimacy and reputation through third-party endorsement of their work.”56 To the artists, the role of international galleries exhibiting their work seemed more significant than that of local ones. Participation in non-commercial exhibitions was also considered important by artists because the curators and organizers of these exhibitions hold a legitimating power. It is possible to postulate that as individuals progress in their visual art practice, they develop a growing perception of themselves as artists. Artists’ individual perspectives and internal conflicts were significant to explore because they helped to interpret their decisions and behaviors. The artist-identity, that is, what it means to be—or to become—an artist, is found to evolve in parallel to artistic production, influenced by the artist’s interactions with institutional agents, social structures, and embedded preconceptions about the lives of artists. These are often counteracted by the artist’s own attitudes and beliefs, and the activities they engage in to procure an income. Each artist’s identity and the development of their practice are therefore found to be unique, but also familiar. The two involve a form of

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negotiation and re-negotiation between their subjective perception of the self and their desired status. As young creative individuals, they believe their talent is innate. They draw the attention of someone from their social environment that recognizes this inclination to art and begins to foster it. The special attention, praise, and encouragement received at home, at school, or during after-school-activities, are instrumental during these formative years and appear to have a decisive impact on the future development of the individual. Artists’ early inclinations regarding their choice of profession seem to be precipitated by such interactions. As young aspiring artists, they revert to traditional and historical perceptions for information—perceptions that originate in poetic writings about Renaissance artists that glorified the artists’ biographies. It is deduced that the artist-identity begins to form, and throughout one’s career is reinforced by, the reproduction of the artist’s myth. This compelling myth has been reproduced using a number of widespread and coinciding motifs that have been perpetuated for centuries and are still revered. The unusual background of artists, the early talent in the arts, the coincidental encounter with a teacher, the intrinsic motivation and divine inspiration, as well as the position of the marginalized creative genius, are a pattern in each artist’s biographical narrative. Although these perceptions have become part of their habitus, their shared beliefs regarding chance, destiny, and natural ability often overshadow the arduous work and years of experimentation that enabled them to pursue their individual creative vision. Even so, the reproduction of this myth becomes an expression of the artists’ confidence in their legitimacy, an internal method of verification of their artist-identity that assists them in overcoming challenges in their careers—for example, failing the art school entrance exam or losing the social status they had been accustomed to during their travels. As developing artists, they encounter several challenges, demands, responsibilities, and expectations that require them to make choices and adjustments. Hindrances to their artistic development, such as the absence of quality art education programs and training in secondary education, the dearth of higher education art academies, the lack of sufficient financial return from their artistic production, as well as scarce time to do creative work due to other responsibilities, are experienced as challenges to the artist-identity. The loss of professional recognition and status, along with the feeling of alienation and disorientation when they return to Cyprus after spending time abroad, is also experienced as an uneasy recurrence. It therefore seems possible that a threat to the development of their art practice could cause the structure of their artist-identity to change. In retrospect though, visual artists consider these experiences to be catalytic to the development of their art practice, as well as to their sense of self. They interpret the overcoming of difficult professional occurrences as re-affirmations of their artistidentity and, instead, express a strong personal disposition toward persistence, tenacity of purpose, and perseverance. As artists now, they maintain studio spaces that define and structure their daily lives and provide the necessary isolation, privacy, and freedom to allow their artistidentity to find expression. They continue to seek the confirmation and validation of their artist-identity from other artists and curators with whom they collaborate; critics or art writers who analyze, interpret, and evaluate their work; gallery workers

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who act as intermediaries for them; cultural institutions that provide a framework for the exhibition and reception of their works of art; artist associations that act as legitimating bodies and representatives of the standards of the profession; as well as public authorities that affect the production and distribution of artworks through their policies and practices. These interactions and accumulative experiences play a significant role in propelling artists forward in their careers. In the end, since the artist-identity guides and activates most of artists’ decisions and behaviors, it is found to be so strong that it becomes almost indistinguishable from the artists’ overall sense of self, representing a core, integrative element of their personal identity that serves as a major factor in the emergence of meaning and structure in these individuals’ lives. This understanding is useful in informing how private and public support systems are structured; what mechanisms, policies, and practices are most appropriate; and when support is needed most.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6 7

8 9

Mark Freeman, Finding the Muse: A Sociopsychological Inquiry into the Conditions of Artistic Creativity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 40. Alison L. Bain, “Constructing an Artistic Identity,” Work, Employment and Society 19, no. 1 (2005): 27. Karen Junod, Writing the Lives of Painters: Biography and Artistic Identity in Britain 1760–1810 (Oxford: Oxford English Monographs, 2011). Philip Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Georgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist (London: Yale University Press, 2000). Antonis Danos, “Twentieth Century Greek Cypriot Art: An ‘Other’ Modernism on the Periphery,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 32, no. 2 (2014): 217. Rita Severis, Travelling Artists in Cyprus 1700–1960 (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2000), 169–79. Danos, “Twentieth Century Greek Cypriot Art,” 227. During their interviews, visual artists divulged sensitive information about their social and professional relationships (with galleries, state officials, and their colleagues) as well as their financial situation and income streams. In order to ensure that artists would be open and confident when speaking with me, their names were kept confidential. To ensure anonymity, all data collected obscured personal details by replacing the participants’ names with ascending code numbers in the order of the interviews, in a way that makes them unidentifiable (I001, I002 for artists and AS01, AS02 for individuals from the art sector, including cultural service officers from the state and local authorities, gallery directors, collectors, art writers, and a Member of the Parliament responsible for cultural affairs). Participants were aged between twenty-two and seventy-two at the time they were interviewed. Thirteen female and thirteen male visual artists were interviewed.

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10 The scope of this thesis is limited to the study of visual artists living and working in the Southern part of the island. Interviewees were geographically spread in urban and rural areas, with small clusters in the cities and particularly in the capital, Nicosia, where more artists, galleries, and cultural institutions are located. This means that most interviewees were Greek-Cypriots, being the largest ethno-linguistic community in the Southern part of the island, but other ethnic and religious minority groups, such as Armenian-Cypriots, British-Cypriots, and AmericanCypriots, are also represented in this study. Visual artists residing in the Northern, occupied part of Cyprus are beyond the scope of this study. It is likely that their inclusion would have significantly expanded the purview of the research since it would essentially discuss the situation of visual artists in two very distinct social, political, and cultural systems. This might have been an interesting approach if this were a comparative study or a larger-scale research project. Instead, I mostly focus on the national context of the Republic of Cyprus. 11 Participants had all obtained a first degree in the arts while nearly half of them had continued their education on a postgraduate and doctorate level. They had studied in educational institutions predominantly in the UK, Greece, Italy, and France but also Czech Republic, Russia, the United States, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Germany. 12 Memos were written before and immediately after data collection as a means of documenting my impressions of the situation. They cultivated an analytical distance that enabled me to think about and reflect on the data. Keeping memos continued during the data analysis process, when comparisons and connections allowed me to specify questions and directions which were then pursued. Informal observations, impressions, and comments at each visit, particularly at informal meetings with artists, were recorded in the form of memos and incorporated in the data analysis process. They helped me refine the data and later they assisted in the theory development process. 13 Visits to exhibitions, including opening shows at commercial galleries, cultural institutions, and artist-led spaces, were found to be of great assistance. Attending such events provided me with a deeper understanding of the behaviors and interactions among individuals in the art world and enabled me to network with artists, curators, gallery directors, and the public there. The data collected through these observations also informed early sampling decisions and refined the research agenda. 14 Grounded Theory Methodology is an “inductive, theory-building process of inquiry,” developed in 1967 by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss. It aims to systematically develop theories on human behavior that are grounded in empirical data. Considering the lack of data on the situation of visual artists in Cyprus and the aims of the study, it was considered suitable to adopt a methodology that would generate new theory from data, as opposed to testing an existing theory. 15 I006 2012, personal communication, March 10. 16 I019 2012, personal communication, June 15. 17 Ibid. 18 I025 2012, personal communication, September 12. 19 I023 2012, personal communication, September 8. 20 I008 2012, personal communication, March 26. 21 I013 2012, personal communication, May 17. 22 I012 2012, personal communication, May 15.

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23 I002 2011, personal communication, December 29. 24 I005 2012, personal communication, March 7. 25 Epiphany is a sudden sensation of new awareness experienced when an event, which had aroused no special impression when it occurred, is recalled at a future time with new meaning. 26 I009 2012, personal communication, April 2. 27 I002 2011, personal communication, December 29; I004 2012, personal communication, March 7; I010 2012, personal communication, May 10. 28 I002 2011, personal communication, December 29; I006 2012, personal communication, March 10. 29 I010 2012, personal communication, May 10. 30 Laurie Patton and Wendy Doniger, Myth and Method (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 112. 31 Catherine Soussloff, The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3. 32 Bain, “Constructing an Artistic Identity,” 27. 33 Freeman, Finding the Muse, 40. 34 Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979 [1934]). 35 The accuracy of recovered memories may be questioned. It may be argued that artists’ constant meditation on their memories has led them to bestow new meanings on many of their childhood experiences. As memory is inherently a reproductive process, “whereby we piece together the past to form a coherent narrative that becomes our autobiography,” all individuals inevitably color and shape their life’s experiences. Daniel Bernstein and Elizabeth Loftus, “How to Tell if a Particular Memory Is True or False,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 4 (2009): 373. 36 Sigrid Røyseng, Per Mangset, and JorunnSpord Borgen, “Young Artists and the Charismatic Myth,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 13, no. 1 (2007): 5. 37 Elena Stylianou and Nicos Philippou, Greek-Cypriot Locality: (Re) Defining our Understanding of European Modernity, in a Companion to Modern Art (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2018), 345. 38 Severis, Travelling Artists in Cyprus 1700–1960, 192. 39 Reverse culture shock is a term used to explain the experiences of individuals readjusting, re-acculturating, and re-assimilating into their home culture after living abroad for a certain period of time. These experiences are considered to be “temporal psychological difficulties,” precipitated by the loss of familiar cues, which individuals do not expect when returning home. 40 I009 2012, personal communication, April 2. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 I012 2012, personal communication, May 15. 45 I007 2012, personal communication, March 26. 46 I010 2012, personal communication, May 10. 47 George McCall and Jerry Simmons, Identities and Interactions (New York: Free Press, 1982), 67. 48 I015 2012, personal communication, May 22. 49 I004 2012, personal communication, March 7. 50 I015 2012, personal communication, May 22.

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I007 2012, personal communication, March 26. I006 2012, personal communication, March 10. I004 2012, personal communication, March 7. I015 2012, personal communication, May 22. According to the Department of Cultural Services’ policy on purchasing works of art by Cypriot artists, the aim is “to encourage artistic creation and establish a State Collection of works of art documenting in the best possible way the course of modern and contemporary Cypriot art from the late 19th century to the present date.” The policy document suggests that decisions for purchases are based on a value measurement system that was introduced in 2012. Interviews with policymakers and cultural officers demonstrated that until then, traditional egalitarian notions had a hegemonic position in the implementation of the policy, with purchases being based on artists’ need for financial support rather than merit. The policy is purportedly now implemented solely based on virtue, following the recommendations of a selection committee composed of independent experts in the field of visual arts. Ministry of Education and Culture, Annual Report 2016 (Nicosia: MOEC, 2016), 591, http:// www.moec.gov.cy/en/annual_reports/annual_report_2016_en.pdf 56 Kim Lehman and Mark Wickham, “Marketing Orientation and Activities in the Arts-Marketing Context: Introducing a Visual Artists’ Marketing Trajectory Model,” Journal of Marketing Management 30, no. 7/8 (2014): 12.

4

Peripheral Visions: The “Peripheral” Position as Productive of Artistic Process Marina Kassianidou

In her book One Place after Another, Miwon Kwon discusses the now-common phenomenon of the itinerant artist—one who travels and produces artworks all over the world.1 Over the past nine years, I have become such a peripatetic artist by embarking on a series of artist residencies across Europe and the United States, as a way of both producing and presenting work. In this text, I place this itinerant practice within the context of my position as an artist from Cyprus, a country often described as being on the “periphery” of the art world. I discuss the necessity of both traveling and participating in artist residencies and the impact of this mode of working on artistic process. Artistic process refers to how artists approach art-making, what methods they use to develop their work, and how those methods intersect with material and conceptual explorations. By focusing on my artistic process, I explore how traveling and working in various spaces over time became an integral part of my work as an artist, enabling me to construct a trajectory of interconnected spaces at the level of my actual practice. My aim is to show how occupying both a “peripheral” and peripatetic position can generate an artistic process. In turn, this process enacts a way of approaching the world that remains attentive to the specificity of one’s surroundings and that conceptualizes space—any kind of space—as non-blank and non-neutral, that is, as non-“peripheral.” The text is organized in three parts. In the first part, I discuss the specific conditions faced by Cypriot and Cyprus-based artists. I also address the status of Cyprus as a “peripheral” art scene in relation to colonialism and globalization. In the second part, I focus on my process of working as an artist and on how this has developed through a series of artist residencies. Finally, in the third part, I bring context and process together to consider the implications of occupying a “peripheral” and peripatetic position and the effects this can have on artistic practice. Methodologically, I am writing from the point of view of an artist now partly based in Cyprus. I evoke here Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges.”2 This involves the researcher locating herself in a specific and, necessarily, partial position— embodied, physical, social, theoretical, and political—and learning how to look from that position, in detail and actively.3

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Another methodological decision pertains to my emphasis on artistic process. Discussing artistic process reveals the intellectual dimensions of art-making as a mode of thinking and researching.4 In the case of Cypriot and Cyprus-based artists, to date little has been done to examine their creative processes and how these might relate to their living and working conditions. As a result, both the nuances of these artists’ works and their relationship and contribution to the international discussion surrounding artistic process have gone unexamined.5 It is only by acknowledging these contributions and creating links between local and international discussions— and, thus, diversifying those discussions—that binary notions of artistic centers versus peripheries can be rethought. My emphasis on the intermingling of the “peripheral” position and artistic process has the precise aim of opening up these discussions. By exploring the specificities of my process, I can show how my situation in Cyprus has affected my approach toward making.

To Leave, or Not to Leave, That Is the Question Cyprus-based artists of my generation—born after 1975—often say they feel “stuck” in the so-called periphery. They contemplate whether they should stay or move to an art “center,” a place that serves as a base for multiple museums, curators, gallerists, and critics. What is the periphery and what does this notion of “being stuck” entail? In this section, I juxtapose the practical challenges faced by artists working in Cyprus with the ideological implications of the term “artistic periphery.” While the two are related, I argue for the need to differentiate between actual challenges faced by artists in certain parts of the world due to financial, geographical, and political reasons, and ideological constructs that partially feed on and, at the same time, amplify those challenges. Cyprus is a small country, with a small art audience and an even smaller number of art collectors. While the doors of several art galleries and art spaces remain open and the Ministry of Education and Culture maintains a National Gallery collection, which necessitates the frequent acquisition of works by Cyprus-based artists, the landscape is not large enough to financially support the careers of full-time artists. Moreover, there is no sustained funding for artists. The grants provided by the above ministry are tied to specific projects, usually exhibitions and artist residencies, and are often limited in scope. For instance, the maximum amount an artist can receive for a residency and/or exhibition is 3,000 euros.6 In addition, the laws that are in place to support artists financially are poorly implemented. For example, as the Cyprus Visual Artists Association has pointed out, authorities have largely failed to enforce the 2009 law that requires 1 percent of the total building costs of public buildings to be allocated to buying artworks.7 These financial considerations have led many artists to look abroad for sources of funding, through European grants, for instance, or through artist residencies. Several Cypriot artists are also based abroad, either permanently or for part of the year.8 While each artist has their own reasons for migrating, this pattern could be attributed to the limited support that Cyprus-based artists receive. Visibility for artists in Cyprus is also limited. Currently, there is no Museum of Contemporary Art to exhibit the work of Cypriot and Cyprus-based artists and

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promote it both locally and internationally.9 In a world that is becoming increasingly global, artists want to boost their international visibility. This issue becomes more challenging due to Cyprus’ geographic conditions—traveling and transporting work to and from an island can be expensive.10 Likewise, bringing international curators, gallerists, museum directors, critics, and collectors over to see the work of local artists can be costly and usually requires institutional support. Of course, the ubiquity of the internet, which has given rise to personal websites, curated online platforms, as well as social media, has alleviated some of the problems pertaining to visibility. This visibility, however, remains virtual and privileges only certain kinds of artwork. All the issues discussed so far can be categorized as practical problems that, I believe, can and should be addressed with the help of institutions, at both the state and private level, as well as through additional and sustained funding for artists. These everyday realities need to be considered alongside the ideological underpinnings of the term “periphery.” In fact, the construct of the artistic periphery can be seen as an intersection of actual challenges and ideological concerns. The distinction between center and periphery has historically reinforced and continues to perpetuate a hierarchy that privileges the former. This privileging of the center further diminishes the visibility of artists working in the so-called periphery. Not only might it be geographically and financially challenging to access certain areas and see artists’ work, but there is an assumption, at least historically, that there is no need to—that all ground-breaking work is produced in the center and that developments in art flow from the center to the periphery.11 The assumption also extends to the notion that what is produced in the center has a sole claim to universality, itself another ideological construct.12 Anything produced in the periphery is thus seen as too specific, solely an expression of ethnic or national character and not as relevant to contemporary artistic practice and global developments. Such narratives echo colonialist approaches and specifically the “fiction of a ‘blank page’,”13 as discussed by José Rabasa. Rabasa references Michel de Certeau’s discussion of the blank page as an essential component of writing. The blank page provides a distinct and empty space in which the writing subject “can exercise his own will.”14 By approaching parts of the world as blank, colonialists gave themselves permission to impose their own will while marginalizing native cultures.15 This marginalization is evident in certain approaches to art. Several authors have discussed the connections between the Western art history canon and colonialism, arguing that colonial legacy established and maintained the assumed superiority of Western art.16 The colonizing powers determined the criteria that enabled them to elevate Western art while marginalizing art made by artists who were colonial, and subsequently postcolonial, subjects.17 In a sense, the hierarchical center/periphery narrative views the periphery as blank, a space that passively receives but never actively produces. This furthers the assumption that there is nothing in the periphery worth seeing—it all comes from the center. The fallacy of this assumption reveals the center/periphery hierarchy as an ideological construction. My earlier discussion of the challenges Cyprus-based artists face is by no means an endorsement of the notion that the periphery is blank or that such a thing as an “artistic periphery” even exists. In fact, so-called peripheries have always produced

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“locally evolving alternatives to imports.”18 Despite ongoing challenges, an active art scene has been developing in Cyprus. A British protectorate since 1878 and a British colony as of 1925, Cyprus became independent in 1960. Artistic development spans pre-1974 modernism, the post-1974 response to the violent restructuring of the country, and a much more heterogeneous artistic growth from the 1980s onwards.19 Throughout, several Cypriot artists have achieved local and international recognition. Contemporary Cypriot art has become more visible due to the proliferation of internationally connected art spaces and artist-run spaces, projects that include international participants, and the establishment of art programs in tertiary education.20 Furthermore, global shifts have led to a renewed interest in “peripheral” art scenes. Since the late 1980s, art from the so-called peripheries has enjoyed a growing presence on the international art scene, including at major biennials.21 Stuart Hall attributes this shift to the struggle against colonization and globalization, pointing out that since the mid-1980s, the “thematics of visual representation have been massively rewritten from the margins, from the excluded.”22 In recent years, a growing number of international curators and well-known arts websites and journals have turned their attention to Cypriot and Cyprus-based artists. Several online articles discuss the vibrancy and DIY spirit of the local art scene, the proliferation of artist-run spaces, the ongoing difficulties faced by artists in Cyprus due to limited institutional support, the relatively cheap rents that may make Cyprus appealing for artists, and the status of Cyprus as a divided country.23 In a 2017 article, Cathryn Drake goes as far as calling Cyprus “Europe’s most exciting art hub,” suggesting its transition into a center. She goes on to say that “experimentation is a prerogative at the periphery” and that “making art under these circumstances is an inspired act of survival and resistance.”24 Drake’s characterization of Cyprus as both an art hub and as being on the periphery contests the fixity of the center/periphery binary while revealing the inherent fluidity of the terms themselves, which remain relative. Still, the center/periphery pairing retains hierarchical and geographical implications. Even though the global/local pairing, which allows for plurality and decentralization, has become more widespread since the late 1980s, the center/periphery distinction persists.25 Moreover, the problems faced by artists on the “peripheries” are very much alive and pressing.26 Indeed, in Cyprus, because of the practical challenges discussed earlier as well as the perceived and ideological distinction between center and periphery, the links between the local and international art scene have not always been easy to establish. To end this section, I return to being stuck, a feeling that several artists in Cyprus, including myself, experience. We are caught between resistance and survival, impulses that are also identified by Drake. On the one hand, staying is a form of resistance to and subversion of the stubborn center/periphery hierarchy. On the other, restricted support and overall limited visibility pose challenges to survival, both financial and professional. While considering my position, I concluded, like many other artists, that traveling is a necessity and that one productive option would be to participate in artist residencies. Traveling and attending residencies are both important components of the current global art scene.27 Many artists attend residencies for the time and space they offer. For artists based on the “periphery,” residencies often prove critical, as they come with resources that may otherwise be inaccessible. My motivations included the desire to reach a larger international audience and acquire funding to make work,

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funding that is often tied to residencies. Fixed-term use of studio spaces located closer to art “centers” would enable me to show my work to otherwise hard-to-reach curators, gallerists, and critics. Given these considerations, as of 2010, I became a peripatetic artist. While most residencies support artists’ existing practices, in my case, the process of traveling and working in different spaces in itself became an integral part of my artistic process. Thus, the feeling of being stuck and the mobility that occurred as a result revealed themselves as generative positions.

Moving with-in Spaces: An Artistic Process Currently, my practice focuses on processes of marking. Creating marks on a surface is a fundamental way of producing and communicating meaning as well as declaring our existence in the world. It is also a way of organizing the world—drawing borders on maps, partitioning space, or connecting nodes in networks. The recent history of Cyprus has itself been defined by a line—the so-called Green Line—that divides the island and determines people’s occupation of and movement through space. Processes of marking then can operate on multiple levels, including the communicative, existential, and political. Moreover, as Catherine de Zegher points out, leaving marks on a surface is a relational activity that uses touch to link our inner impulses and thoughts to something other.28 This other is at the most basic level a surface. As psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron argues, the differentiation between drawn mark and surface symbolizes a differentiation between self and other, with the mark coming from the self, that is, from the person marking, and the surface playing the role of the other.29 Thus, on a psychic level, marking becomes a process of structuring, performing, and understanding the self ’s relation to an other. This relation is customarily approached as a hierarchical distinction. For example, in paintings and drawings, the artist’s marks usually differentiate themselves from the surrounding surface and become visible signs of the artist’s actions. Most historical and theoretical analyses of marking in art focus almost entirely on the qualities of the artist’s marks. The surface is seen as neutral, blank, or absent, forming the passive ground against which the marks stand. Returning to Michel de Certeau, this distinction confirms the autonomy of the artist/subject who is “confronted by an object” that he himself can own.30 That is, approaching the surface—be it a sheet of paper, a space, or the surface of the earth—as blank or passive allows the person marking to claim ownership of both the marks and the surface.31 Furthermore, through this ownership, the person marking can claim the position of master and sole occupier of the territory. Within this framework, my aim is to shift these relationships by focusing on the other, that is, the surface, right from the beginning of the art-making process. I set myself the task of responding directly to the features of the surface rather than treating it as “blank.” I work mainly with surfaces found in my immediate surroundings, such as vinyl flooring and actual walls and floors. Rather than being the physical support for my marks, these materials become an integral part of my work. I study each surface closely and experiment with ways of marking it, seeking marks that respond to its appearance, use, or history. As a result, my marks become partially indiscernible, receding into the surface

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or becoming confused with accidental, natural, or mechanically made marks. This inseparability of artist’s mark and surface questions hierarchical distinctions between the two and foregrounds the role that the surface plays in the making of each work.32 The practice I have just described emerged partly through my working conditions in Cyprus and over the course of my residencies. Specifically, the work I produced in various places and my movement between them eventually formed a trajectory of interlinked spaces. The first space in this trajectory is my studio in Limassol, Cyprus: a house built in 1963 and in which my family lived until 1983. Since 2008, I have been using the living room as my workspace. This large space has worn wooden floors and big windows facing the street. The paint is peeling off the walls and humidity stains have formed on the ceiling. There are worn sheets of vinyl covering the kitchen floor and the kitchen and bedroom shelves are lined with adhesive vinyl, a rather cheap material broadly used until relatively recently in Cyprus to line furniture. One of the first found surfaces I worked with was a sheet of wood-patterned vinyl flooring extracted from my grandparents’ house during a renovation. I was drawn to the strangeness of this material, more specifically, the absurdity of it pretending to be wood. This pretense allows wider access to (the image of) wood, an expensive material. After extensive experimentation, I eventually began tracing stains found on my studio floor and recreating the shapes on the vinyl, using small painted marks that resembled marks on the printed pattern. These painted marks were visually absorbed into the surface, intertwining with the pattern (Figure 4.1). The works were displayed

Figure 4.1  Marina Kassianidou, Stain Painting (detail), 2008–9, acrylic on found vinyl flooring, 62 × 48 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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on the floor, where the vinyl would normally have been found, partially blending in with the surroundings (Figure 4.2). The relationship between work and space thus resonated with the relationship between mark and surface. In retrospect, this first space and the first found surface with which I worked put me on a trajectory of interconnected spaces. While undertaking several residencies

Figure 4.2  Marina Kassianidou, Stain Painting, 2008–9, acrylic on found vinyl flooring, 62 × 48 cm, installed in artist’s studio, Limassol, Cyprus. Courtesy of the artist.

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from 2010 to 2016, I found myself in a variety of spaces where I worked for specific periods of time and also exhibited the resulting work. My process involved moving into a space, bringing works and materials with me, making new work in response to the space, and setting up installations within that space. The works and materials I brought with me depended on the features of the space. Once I began to work, my increasing familiarization with the space would lead to immovable and movable siteresponsive works that attempted to capture aspects of that space. As in the case of my Limassol studio, I focused on remaking pre-existing traces. Upon leaving, I would take the portable works with me and leave behind or remove the immovable works, thus partially erasing my traces. The portable works could then reappear in another space. Thus, traces of a space, in the form of literal traces as well as materials and works, traveled with me elsewhere. For example, stain paintings made in my studio in Limassol were shown during my residency at the Ragdale Foundation in Illinois, USA, alongside stain paintings made there. This installation looked like a temporary repair job—as if the floor had been fixed using whatever materials were available. A stain collage made during my residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in Virginia, USA, which recreated floor damage, later formed part of an installation at The Center for Drawing in London (Figure 4.3). It was joined there by stain paintings based on the center’s floor. Thus, traces I encountered in a space remained with me, migrating to subsequent spaces and commingling with those spaces’ traces and surfaces. With regards to the actual form the installations took, I embraced the temporal spatiality of temporariness.33 The spaces in which I have worked and shown work form part of a narrative of functional temporariness; one after the other, artists take turns to occupy each space. This temporariness is embedded in my installations. Precariously leaning pieces and works laid out on the floor can be easily picked up and moved. The installations embody a sense that at any moment the current relationships can change. Moreover, each individual work is relatively small and transportable, a concession to my mobility: the works must be either shipped compactly or transported in my luggage. Shipping large works is not financially sustainable or even possible, as several residencies have limits regarding the size of shipped boxes they can accept. In addition, restrictions imposed by airlines have over the years made it difficult to carry large portfolios onboard. As such, my work consists of small pieces that together make up larger installations—a modular logic. These movable works contrast with the immovable works that have often taken the form of wall drawings. For example, during my time at the Stonehouse Residency for Contemporary Arts, I worked on a wall drawing that recreated found paint stains. I drew directly over the stains, following the rough texture of the wall. My drawing made the faint stains slightly more visible (Figure 4.4). Such works could not be moved elsewhere. More often than not, I had to erase my marks to prepare the space for the next resident. These works now exist only as photographs, traces of my temporary presence in each space. In the end, each encounter with a space affected my future encounters with other spaces. Since new works were made in response to a specific space, at times using surfaces I had not used before, the collection of surfaces forming part of my practice

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Figure 4.3  Marina Kassianidou, Plans and Renovations (exhibition view), 2014, installed at The Center for Drawing UAL, London, UK. Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 4.4  Marina Kassianidou, Wall Drawing I, 2010, colored pencils on wall, 220 × 270 cm, site-specific drawing at Stonehouse Residency for the Contemporary Arts, Miramonte, CA, USA. Courtesy of the artist.

gradually grew. Likewise, new marks were added to my practice; marks I drew or painted over or marks I transferred onto surfaces. These accumulated materials and marks—traces or material memories of a space—traveled with me, participating in a form of migration that echoed my own movement through and between spaces.

Negotiations, Paradoxes, and (Im)possible Positions In this final section, I revisit my artistic process examining how I, as the artist, and the works I produce are positioned in relation to space, time, movement, visibility, and the peripheral. To begin, I return to the question of whether to leave or not to leave one’s place. At the heart of this question, I see a tension that relates to how one conceptualizes and relates to movement, time, and place/space.34 In an increasingly globalized world, both space and time have shifted in status. Kamal Boullata suggests that the current manifestations of globalization, characterized by global communication networks and transnational exchanges, can overcome spatial limitations and prioritize time, speed, and efficiency.35 This overcoming of space may also be related to globalization’s homogenizing tendencies, which flatten places and spaces, erase their differences, and commodify and serialize them.36 Achille Bonito Oliva links the shift in the status of space to the itinerant practices of contemporary artists. In order to resist both globalization and tribalization, a potentially reactionary

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response linked to nationalism, many artists persist in producing their own work and imagery while adopting “cultural nomadism,” exercising “their freedom to wander across the boundaries of various cultures.”37 Oliva links this artistic nomadism to a refusal to belong and a denial of the value of space and habitat “in favour of the value of time condensed in the form of [the artists’] work.”38 This seemingly absolute denial of space is not in line with how I see my process. So far, I have approached artist residencies not only as a way of building on the body of my work by working for a time in a specific space, but also as a way of developing my practice by working with the space or with-in the space. I am using the modified spelling of this word, as proposed by Bracha L. Ettinger, to retain a dual meaning—being inside and being with.39 Each space impacts my decisions, determining what works can be made and exhibited in it and how. Thus, the works are inextricably linked to the spaces with-in which they are made and shown—they come into being with-in the space. At the same time, they subtly modify the space in which they exist, albeit temporarily, emphasizing specific aspects by recreating them. Thus, the space comes into being with-in the works. By remaining attentive to the physicality of the workplace, I work within a tradition of artists who re-conceptualize site as something other than a blank space waiting to receive work—an issue emerging out of installation and site-specific practices since the 1960s. How then does a site-specific or site-responsive mode of working shift when mobility also becomes a mode of living and working? Site-specificity and mobility are not exactly at odds. In fact, the “mobilization of site specificity” is something Miwon Kwon identifies as a development that challenges site-specificity’s original rigid adherence to a physical site.40 Moreover, bringing together site-specificity and mobility can be seen as another response to globalization, homogenization, and the loss of place.41 When discussing artists who are frequently invited by institutions to produce site-specific works, Kwon points out that sitespecificity has been appropriated as a way of valorizing locational identity.42 This pursuit, she suggests, is illusory as it assumes that both place/space/site and identity are stable and consistently pre-dating new cultural forms that might be introduced to or arise from them.43 In addition to whatever other problems this assumption may carry, Kwon points out that it is out of sync with contemporary modes of being and working, including the fluidity of nomadism. This discussion suggests that the denial of space identified by Oliva needs to be qualified—maybe what is needed is the denial, or rather questioning, of certain conceptions of space. Kwon suggests that perhaps one approach toward site-specific contemporary art practice would be to seek “a terrain between mobilization and specificity—to be out of place with punctuality and precision.”44 This entails keeping apparent contradictions and oppositions concurrently in one’s mind and understanding them as “sustaining relations.”45 In the rest of this section, I will attempt to think of contradictions and oppositions concurrently, through my work: mobility and stillness, the generic and the specific, visibility and invisibility, the peripheral and the central. The co-existence of these contradictions shifts each term and enables a simultaneous relating to and generating of space that perhaps approximates “a terrain between mobilization and specificity.”46 The negotiation between mobility and stillness occurs on several levels and may reveal a desire to both move through space and stay in place. Some works are literally

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immovable—site-specific in the strict sense of the term—while some are movable and appear as part of ephemeral and precarious installations, as discussed earlier, embodying a temporality of temporariness. The impermanence of the installations points to a state of uncertainty, while highlighting the limited time I have in each space—upon my departure, someone else will take my place. In both size and temporality, they thus remain on a human scale, “as fragile as our relations and as finite as our brief lives,” as Anna Dezeuze describes the field of experience within which precarious artworks operate.47 In addition, my physical movement between spaces alternates with intense stillness—being stuck perhaps—within each space. In order to work with and to get to know that space, I situate myself there, with-in its physicality. I do not approach it as a blank page, as an empty container waiting to receive work, but as something that shapes and is shaped by the work, a space of potentiality. This mode of working requires closely studying each space and excavating its history through marks and materials. I methodically observe and record traces, “with punctuality and precision,” to use Kwon’s phrase. I almost “photographically” document stains on the floor and walls, “touching” the space through paintings, drawings, and collages. These stains may have formed in an instant or may have accumulated over the course of years. This historical temporality co-exists with the ephemerality of my own and my work’s presence in that space. Despite my eventual movement out of a space, the work remains with that space. The carrying of traces of each space—this not letting go—is embedded within the practice, which paradoxically depends on both moving on, yet in some ways, staying put. Another negotiation occurs between the generic and the specific. Most surfaces I work with belong in interior environments, domestic as well as office or work environments. The spaces I usually find myself in bear traces of different uses and again relate to domestic or work environments, including the artist’s studio. Moreover, both surfaces and spaces tend toward the ordinary and everyday. The surfaces are not associated with one specific place but with types of places. In this sense, they can come across as rather generic. For instance, the vinyl flooring I have worked with is quite ordinary and can be found in a range of spaces. Many people would readily recognize this material and may even have memories of encountering it elsewhere. These surfaces thus evoke a sense of the familiar spaces or material environments many people move through. The repetition of materials in different spaces creates a continuity between spaces and works, a continuity that allows them to exist beside each other in a linked trajectory. This generic ordinariness and continuity coexist with an increased sensitization to material specificity. For example, vinyl flooring procured at different places displays different qualities. Vinyl flooring I bought in the UK, which was manufactured in Germany, was more textured than the cheaper variety I found in Cyprus. Such intricate qualities—the “locality” of materials—are highlighted by the itinerant nature of my practice. Moreover, each response is specific to each space, no matter how generic or ordinary that space may first appear to be. Finally, I turn to the negotiation between visibility and invisibility. The excavation I perform in each space focuses on the negligible and imperceptible—stains, traces of damage, nuance of materials. I am drawn to the details that gradually become visible

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through observation. It is almost an other way of approaching space, not through what is at first perceivable and known, but through what emerges via sustained attentiveness. In a sense, I adopt a peripheral vision, working with what might recede or what might not be immediately visible in a space. Indeed, peripheral vision refers to a non-central gaze, to what is seen by the eye on the sides rather than straight ahead. The side gaze and central gaze are of course unfixed, interchangeable positions. Through movement of the eyes and body, what is at the periphery can shift to the center and vice versa, revealing the fluidity of the terms themselves. The ignorable aspects of each space become the focus of my works, which, in turn, also adopt a peripheral positioning, partially blending into the space. The floor pieces appear to be parts of the actual floor, while my wall drawings appear to be stains. When the work is shown, the viewers are asked to practice peripheral vision—to look for what recedes. Sometimes, this shifts their relation to space. For example, once viewers became aware of the wall drawing at the Stonehouse studio, they began studying the other walls looking for more drawings, observing traces, and approaching the space anew. Peripheral vision, then, has the potential to initiate a process of experiencing the world differently. All of these negotiations point to modes of relating to our surroundings that do not involve imposing our presence, but rather becoming attentive to what is already there and finding ways of working with it. This, in turn, can re-generate our surroundings and our ways of existing with-in those surroundings. In each instance, the materials and works I bring to a space are transformed by it, just as the space is transformed by them. The process I have adopted resists fixity and clear boundaries. The space that is denied by this mode of working is one that is always fixed, pre-existing, and clearly demarcated. The space that is instead generated is one that is contradictory and relational, distributed and located, mobile and immobile, specific and generic, on the verge of visibility and invisibility. What I hope emerges through placing my practice in conversation with my being an artist from Cyprus is the generative potential of the “peripheral” position when the latter is occupied deliberately. In my case, the “peripheral” position led to a peripatetic practice, which developed partly through encounters with a series of spaces. Residencies were not only a means to complete preconceived work, but also a way to explore how one relates to one’s surroundings through the creation and documentation of temporary installations. The repetitive encounters with spaces led to a continual practicing of how to relate to space while subverting predetermined spatiotemporal boundaries. In turn, this attentive movement through the world—this distributed workspace—might suggest a way of approaching and being, or rather becoming, within space and the world at large. It might even suggest a different organization of the world—one revolving around a web of spaces and subjectivities that encounter, touch, and partially leak into each other while retaining their specificity.

Conclusion In the end, my response to the quandary of whether to leave or not was to leave and stay. Since 2016, I have been maintaining a more “stable” peripatetic position,

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splitting my time between Cyprus and the United States. Movement and the carrying of spaces/traces with me are becoming a habit.

Notes Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 46–55. 2 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 581. 3 Ibid., 582–3. 4 See, for example, Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, eds., Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010); Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum, eds., On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2013); Katy Macleod and Lin Holdridge, eds., Thinking through Art: Reflections on Art as Research (Oxford: Routledge, 2006). 5 To address this gap, I have recently edited a book, in Greek, that contains conversations with Cypriot and Cyprus-based artists revolving around their artistic processes. Marina Kassianidou, ed., Μπαίνοντας στην εικόνα οι λέξεις [When Words Enter the Picture] (Nicosia: Visual Artists Association EI.KA, 2017). An English translation is underway. 6 Cultural Services, Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture, Πρόγραμμα “Πολιτισμός” (2015–2020): Υποπρόγραμμα “Εικαστικά” [Culture Program (2015– 2020): Visual Arts Sub-Program], http://www.moec.gov.cy/politistikes_ypiresies/ programmata/politismos/programma_eikastika.pdf (accessed September 5, 2019). 7 Meropi Moyseos, “Εφαρμογή του 1% ζητά ο Σύνδεσμος Εικαστικών Καλλιτεχνών” [Visual Artists Association demanding enforcement of 1% law], Parathyro, July 10, 2019, http://parathyro.politis.com.cy/2019/07/efarmogi-tou-1-zita-o-syndesmoseikastikon-kallitechnon/. 8 It is useful, for example, to look at the twelve artists who represented Cyprus at the Venice Biennale between 2007 and 2017. Eight of those artists were based abroad at the time and four were based in Cyprus. 9 Cultural Services at the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture have initiated the procedures for the creation of the Cyprus Museum of Contemporary Art. See the State Gallery of Contemporary Art–SPEL website, http://www.moca.org.cy/ (accessed September 5, 2019). 10 This has become more apparent to me now. Being partly based in the United States, I witness the relative ease with which an artist can drive their work to an exhibition at the other end of the country or how readily a curator might agree to take a threehour drive to visit an artist’s studio. 11 See, for example, Partha Mitter, “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avantgarde Art from the Periphery,” The Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008): 531–48; Antonis Danos, “Twentieth-century Greek Cypriot Art: An ‘Other’ Modernism on the Periphery,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 32, no. 2 (2014): 217–52; Ulf Hannerz, “Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures,” in Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 107–28. 1

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12 Peter Weibel, “Globalization and Contemporary Art,” in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, ed. Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe: ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, 2013), 23–4. 13 José Rabasa, Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 56. 14 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 134. 15 See also Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 16 See, for example, Thomas McEvilley, Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (Kingston, NY: Documentext/McPherson, 1992); Staffan Schmidt, “Welcome Home Miss Aouda,” in Peripheral Insider: Perspectives on Contemporary Internationalism in Visual Culture, ed. Khaled D. Ramadan (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2007), 94–110; Weibel, “Globalization and Contemporary Art,” 20–7. 17 Ibid. 18 Hannerz, “Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures,” 125. See also Gerardo Mosquera, “Spheres, Cities, Transitions: International Perspectives on Art and Culture,” in Belonging and Globalisation: Critical Essays in Contemporary Art and Culture, ed. Kamal Boullata (London: Saqi, 2008), 87–92. 19 See, for example, Danos, “Twentieth-century Greek Cypriot Art.” 20 Examples of art spaces that opened in the past eight years include Point Center for Contemporary Art, which collaborates with international and local curators, scholars and artists, and Art Seen Contemporary Art Projects and Editions and Eins Gallery, both of which collaborate with international and local artists. Examples of recently opened artist-run spaces include Thkio Ppalies, Koraï, DriveDrive, PARTY Contemporary, and The Island Club. The Visual Artists Association EI.KA, founded in 2006, has recently organized the project Modus Operandi, which connects emerging artists in Cyprus with local and international curators and theorists. Finally, fine art degrees are being offered at the tertiary education level by the University of Nicosia, Frederick University, Alexander College, and the Cyprus University of Technology. The lists in this note are by no means exhaustive. 21 In the book, The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, a timeline of exhibitions is provided demonstrating this shift. Belting, Buddensieg, and Weibel, eds., The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, 58–9. 22 Stuart Hall and Michael Hardt, “Changing States: In the Shadow of Empire,” in Changing States: Contemporary Art and Ideas in an Era of Globalisation, ed. Gilane Tawadros (London: iniVA, 2004), 135. See also Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Culture, Globalization and the World-System, 19–39; Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 151–71; Nicola Trezzi, “Are the Art World’s ‘Peripheries’ Becoming the New Centers?” Artnet News, June 29, 2016, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/howmuseums-look-to-peripheries-527435. 23 See, for example, Vanessa Oberin, “Life on a Divided Island: The Urgency of Contemporary Art in Cyprus,” Freunde von Freunden, June 28, 2016, https://www. freundevonfreunden.com/interviews/artists-peter-eramian-and-stelios-kallinikourepresent-the-new-creative-energy-of-cyprus/; Cathryn Drake, “Why Cyprus Is Europe’s Most Exciting Art Hub Right Now,” Artnet News, March 14, 2017, https:// news.artnet.com/art-world/cyprus-art-scene-887609. 24 Drake, “Why Cyprus Is Europe’s most Exciting Art Hub Right Now.”

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25 Barbara Abou-El-Haj, “Languages and Models for Cultural Exchange,” in Culture, Globalization and the World-System, 142–3. See also Hall, “The Local and the Global,” 19–39; Hans Belting, “From World Art to Global Art: View on a New Panorama,” in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, 178–85; Weibel, “Globalization and Contemporary Art,” 27. 26 See, for example, Antonia Marten, “Performing Identities in the Arena of the Global Art World: Nástio Mosquito,” in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, 291–2. 27 See, for example, Belting, Buddensieg and Weibel, eds., The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, 453; Kwon, One Place after Another, 46–55; Achille Bonito Oliva, “The Globalisation of Art,” in Belonging and Globalisation, 43–5. 28 Catherine de Zegher, “Drawing as Binding/bandage/bondage: Or Eva Hesse Caught in the Triangle of Process/content/materiality,” in Eva Hesse Drawing, ed. Catherine de Zegher (New York: The Drawing Center, 2006), 99. 29 Serge Tisseron, “All Writing Is Drawing: The Spatial Development of the Manuscript,” Yale French Studies 84 (1994): 29–42. 30 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 134. 31 Rabasa, Inventing America, 56. 32 This investigation formed part of a PhD in Fine Art. Marina Kassianidou, “Between Marks and Surfaces: Indiscernibility, Subjectivity, and Otherness” (PhD diss., Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, 2015). 33 My thanks to Gabriel Koureas for suggesting this term. 34 In Human Geography, place is seen as more concrete, rooted, and meaningful, a specific neighborhood for example, whereas space is more abstract and fluid. As the itinerant practice I am describing hovers between these positions, I will be using both terms accordingly. For the tense relationship between the terms “place,” “space,” and “site” in relation to site-specific art, see Kwon, One Place after Another. For the evolving relationship between the terms “place” and “space” in Western philosophy, see Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). 35 Kamal Boullata, “Sharing a Meaning: An Introduction,” in Belonging and Globalisation, 15. 36 Hall, “The Local and the Global,” 28–9. See also Hannerz, “Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures,” 108, and Kwon, One Place after Another, 54–5 and 156–66. 37 Oliva, “The Globalisation of Art,” 43–4. 38 Ibid., 44. 39 Anna Johnson, “Nomad-Words,” in Digital and Other Virtualities: Renegotiating the Image, ed. Anthony Bryant and Griselda Pollock (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 231. 40 Kwon, One Place after Another, 11–55. 41 Ibid., 54–5. 42 Ibid., 53–4. 43 Ibid., 164. 44 Ibid., 166. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Anna Dezeuze, Almost Nothing: Observations on Precarious Practices in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 289.

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5

A Forgotten Anglo-Cypriot Partnership: Glyn Hughes, Christoforos Savva, and the Apophasis Gallery in the Early 1960s Yiannis Toumazis

Introduction This chapter examines aspects of the visual arts scene in the early years of the Republic of Cyprus and considers the fundamental role played by the Apophasis Gallery and its co-founders, Christoforos Savva and Glyn Hughes, in the evolution of art in Cyprus since the early 1960s. In particular, the text focuses on the creative partnership between Savva and Hughes. Through anecdotal material and primary information regarding the synergy of the two artists, mainly from Glyn Hughes’ written narratives, we take a deeper look into the Apophasis Gallery and its operations. We examine closely the contributions of these two artists in the formation of a new perception of art in Cyprus. The establishment of the Apophasis Gallery was unique not only because it was the first artist-run space in Cyprus, but also because it was a non-profit institution, an extremely radical and pioneering fact even by the international standards of the time. From the 1950s onwards, such spaces were mainly established in the major metropolitan centers of art, such as in New York, Los Angeles, London, Geneva, and San Francisco, where the need for such spaces arose from the hegemonic domination of established museums and galleries, as well as the great difficulties contemporary young and avant-garde artists faced in presenting their experimental art practices and pioneering work to the public. In Cyprus, however, Savva and Hughes, realizing that there were no specialized art spaces on the island and eager to draw from the intense creative experiences they acquired abroad, decided to establish the first organized art space in Cyprus and, at the same time, to “raise the aesthetic level of the public and to stimulate its interest in art.”1 By examining the creative interactions between Hughes and Savva, this chapter seeks to highlight the decisive contribution of both artists—not just Savva’s as is common—to this historical undertaking, which had been overlooked until now by the historiography of Cypriot Art. Even though Glyn Hughes is acknowledged as the

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co-founder of Apophasis Gallery by most writers on the subject, the role he played in the development of the gallery is seen as somewhat marginal. On the one hand, this may be due to the fact that he was a foreigner, and, on the other, that Welsh-born Hughes was overshadowed by the explosive but brief presence of Cypriot-born Savva in the art scene of the island. The “Cypriotness” of Apophasis, the cornerstone of progressive art at the time, was crucial for the art narrative of the new Republic of Cyprus.

The Time of the Apophasis Gallery In a manifesto published in the first issue of Cypriot Chronicles in November 1960, Christoforos Savva and Glyn Hughes enthusiastically announce to the Cypriot public the opening of their “legendary” Apophasis (=Decision) Gallery, which despite its short operation (1960–5) was destined to play a key role in the development of the art scene in Cyprus. As they proclaim in their passionate text, their main target was to establish an ambiance of excitement for art in Cyprus and make the gallery an art centre in the heart of the capital. With their decision, they believed that they “threw a pebble into the lake of the spiritual and artistic life of the island.”2 The Apophasis Gallery was opened on May 7, 1960, with a joint exhibition of Savva and Hughes that lasted for a week. It was initially housed at 6 Sophocleous Street in Nicosia, where the two artists had been living together since February/March 1960.3 The two housemates knew that this place was temporary as the building had been sold and would be demolished to make space for a new building “at the altar of the capital’s renovation,” as they put it. It is for this very reason that the gallery was named Apophasis 1, thus expressing the founders’ certainty as to the continuation of their venture. In the summer of 1960, when Cyprus was officially declared an independent state, the gallery moved to a larger space at 44A Apollo Street,4 where Hughes and Savva showed their own and other artists’ work. In addition to the exhibitions, the gallery’s programme of events included lectures, discussions, screenings, traditional music, and play readings. The manifesto clearly and ardently highlights the intentions of the two artists, which aimed to primarily promote art in Cyprus, to encourage new “painters and sculptors,” to teach art, and to establish a space where the public would have the opportunity to be informed and discuss issues related to art. This initiative was innovative and could be considered a radical and novel gesture for an island that had just emerged from a long period of colonialism, following the liberation struggle from British colonial rule. Hughes’ and Savva’s main vision can be compared with the spirit of the era globally in which similar non-profit spaces had begun to appear in large art centres: spaces established by artists for artists that aimed to promote the interests of artists. The revolutionary 1960s created the circumstances for such radical movements. Sensing this global trend, the two artists founded the Apophasis Gallery in Cyprus in parallel with what was happening in the rest of the world. And even though the artistic setting in Cyprus may have been quite different from that prevailing in the West, Hughes’ and Savva’s decision was an important mark, signifying the beginning of a new era for art in Cyprus.

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Cyprus at the Dawn of the Republic of Cyprus At the dawn of the Republic of Cyprus (1960), how different was the production of art by Greek Cypriots from the rest of the international art community?5 Despite changes in the socio-political and economic structure, Cyprus still remained a small, closed, and conservative society. This had consequences that Hughes and Savva addressed in the foundation of their gallery. While under British rule, the first decades of the twentieth century in Cyprus produced artists who, on the one hand, became the first “qualified” professionals, having studied at schools of fine arts abroad, and on the other, became teachers of a younger generation of artists, who, despite the challenging times, followed the often onerous path of visual arts.6 Through their idiosyncrasies, one can say that these artists created their own distinct local style of painting in Cyprus. A style dominated by contradictions, influenced both by English colonial culture and by Greek nationalism (especially the vision for the Union of Cyprus with Greece—the motherland), which had developed during British colonial rule. Thus, what one readily observes in modern Cypriot art is a paradoxical combination of orientalist expressions and nuances—an exoticization of the island and its inhabitants, mainly in relation to folk, Byzantine, and medieval traditions—and efforts to highlight the “heroic” and “glorious” (Greek) past of the island, as well as its historical consistency and continuity. Following the independence of the island, a creative euphoria took hold of the Greek Cypriots in relation to their newly formed state. After decades of colonial rule, the Greek Cypriots had the opportunity to determine for themselves the political, social, economic, and cultural structures of the island.7 Many young artists, most of whom had studied in the UK, settled permanently on the island and, by introducing new trends and innovative ideas, brought about Cyprus’s initiation into the uneasy 1960s. In the Western world, things were somewhat different: as Gabriele Detterer lucidly points out, the rebellious spirit of the 1960s, which questioned everything, also stirred up the field of art.8 Criticism of society along with anti-conformist protests created the preconditions for the opening of the floodgates of creativity and aesthetics that dared to be radically new. Traditional pictorial conceptions were attacked and vanquished by experimental art practices. In this phase of new beginnings, a great number of art movements came to prominence: Fluxus, minimalism, conceptual art, body art, performance art, and media art. Avant-garde art practices extended the boundaries of the concept of fine art and crossed the visual repertory of art with sign and meaning systems derived from music, literature, linguistics, philosophy, theatre, and science. In parallel with the crossing of disciplines, aesthetics was steered onto new paths by innovative electronic communication techniques and Marshall McLuhan’s media theory The Medium Is the Message.9 In every respect, new times were dawning, and the traditional role and function of the artist were therefore also questioned critically in this phase of rethinking, experimenting, and looking ahead. During this time of change and transformation, a number of non-profit, artistrun spaces were founded that were influential in trying out and disseminating avantgarde practices. These organizations can be defined as non-commercial associations

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that were collectively founded and run by artists.10 Important artist-run spaces in the 1960s and1970s were, among others, Art Metropole in Toronto, Ecart in Geneva, Franklin Furnace and Printed Matter in New York, and MOCA and La Mamelle in San Francisco.11 Cyprus may not have followed the subversive course of Western societies, yet this daring move of Christoforos Savva and Glyn Hughes to establish the first artist-run space in Cyprus had virtually the same impact: setting new foundations for understanding art in Cyprus and creating a new visual arts landscape. One where artists would have the autonomy to manage their creative presence, while at the same time creating an innovative framework for the development of art in the new Republic. Furthermore, while it was quite unusual that two people with such different backgrounds and temperaments would set up a joint venture, the truly bold, pioneering aspect of their collaboration was that these two men (one of whom was homosexual) both shared a creative space, and openly lived together. In the conservative Cyprus of the 1960s, this must have been deemed extremely radical. Moreover, through its groundbreaking presentations, the Apophasis laid the foundations for a creative synergy between various art forms, such as theatre, cinema, poetry, shadow theatre, and traditional music, also an unprecedented fact for that time on the island. Welsh-born Glyn Hughes came to Cyprus in 1956, shortly after the beginning of the national liberation struggle of Cyprus against British colonial administration, while Christoforos Savva arrived in June 1959, shortly before the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960.12 The former left Great Britain in search for a “sunnier” creative future in Cyprus, while the latter decided to settle permanently in Nicosia after years of studying, working, and wandering in Cyprus, England, and France.

Christoforos Savva: The Cypriot Bohemian Christoforos Savva (1924–68) was born to a rural family in the village of Marathovouvo in the Famagusta District. He was a reserved and inward-looking child, keeping his thoughts very much to himself, while outwardly appearing sociable.13 Besides farm work and carefree games with other children, he liked to frequent the village coffee house, talk to his fellow villagers, and dream of a very different life. In fact, although his family had right-wing views, he preferred the coffee house of the left-wing supporters “because it was there that more ideas circulated, especially the vision for a better and fairer world.”14 These ideals prompted him to enlist as a volunteer in the British army during the Second World War, following a general invitation by the left-wing party AKEL, fighting against Fascism and Nazism. Thus, from 1943 to 1944, he served in the Cyprus Regiment in Cairo, and from 1944 to 1946 in Section I of 226 Field Company of the Royal Engineers in Italy.15 As soon as the war ended, he moved to London, where he lived from 1947 to 1954. He attended courses at St Martin’s School of Art and the Central School of Art for a while, and from 1948 to 1954 he attended Heatherly’s School of Fine Art, an art school quite liberal for the era, which offered great freedom

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to students to experiment with their personal artistic style. In order to sustain himself, Savva worked at the same time as a waiter in various restaurants. Between 1954 and 1956, Savva returned to Cyprus together with his fellow student and friend Roddy Maude-Roxby, preparing a joint exhibition that would be held in November 1954 at the British Council. For this purpose, the two artists traveled and stayed in different places in Cyprus. As Antonis Iliakis remembers: “Christoforos Savva and Roddy Maude-Roxby moved around by bicycle. The locals thought of them as being exotic, saw them with suspicion.”16 It seems that the dreamy child from Marathovouno had been initiated into the bohemian life of Western artists of the 1950s. In addition, during that period Savva hosted for three months at his father’s house in Marathovouno two other fellow students from Heatherly, Kathleen Blagden and Ros17 Newcomen,18 who left a strong impression on the conservative rural community of the small village of Mesaoria.19 During the same period, Savva also associated with other foreigners living on the island and especially with English people from the British Council.20 He worked toward the establishment of the Pancyprian Association of Friends of Art together with other young people, aiming at the revival of the intellectual and artistic scene of Cyprus. However, Savva’s inquiring mind, his international orientation, the negative reviews of his work criticizing his unrealistic, modern inclinations—especially from the leftist newspapers of the time—in a Cyprus that had already entered the 1955–9 liberation struggle against the British, prompted him to go abroad once again. After a short stopover in London, Savva settled in Montmartre, Paris, and apprenticed at the studio of Cubist André Lhote. The French capital, with its ambiance, its museums, the great painters, the exhibitions, and his teacher were quite revelatory to Savva and marked the subsequent development of his personality and his artistic career. As always, Savva’s financial state was poor and he found it difficult to make ends meet. So, he was forced once again to work in restaurants but was also supported by people who liked or admired both his work and personality, such as the English diplomat Gerard Cruikshank, who seems to have supplemented his income regularly. In a letter to Pantelis Michanikos, Savva writes regarding this matter: “It is better to live unhappy in Paris for twenty years than live happy for forty years in Cyprus. The thing is that we are unhappy everywhere.”21 Savva returned to Cyprus between July 1957 and March 1958. He exhibited his work at the Ledra Palace in Nicosia (1957), at the Cyprus Gallery in Famagusta (1958), and at the Municipal Hall in Limassol (1958). Again, he received controversial reviews—both positive and negative—the latter especially from the left-wing press, which perceived his abstraction as a weakness because it did not “contribute to the rebellion of human consciousness against degradation.”22 He returned to the workshop of Lhote in Paris in March 1958. During his stay there, he also exhibited five works inspired by the increasing violence between the Greek and Turkish communities, culminating in the events at Kioneli and the killing of eight Greek Cypriots on June 12, 1958.23 Because of the tense political situation in France and the election of General De Gaulle, he decided to settle permanently in Cyprus,24 where he returned in June 1959 and initially rented a house at 6 Parthenonos Street in Nicosia.

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Glyn Hughes: The Cypriot Foreigner Glyn Hughes (1931–2014) was born in the village of Hawarden in Flintshire, Wales, near the border with England. After taking lessons at Canterbury College of Art and getting involved in amateur dramatics during his military service in the RAF, Hughes applied to Bretton Hall College of Education in Yorkshire for a training course in teaching art and drama in junior schools between 1951 and 1953.25 According to Hughes, it was at Bretton Hall that he found the right environment and stimulus to generate and develop his enthusiasm for arts. Although placed in a painting group of mature students straight from art school with the appropriate diplomas, he was not discouraged. Hughes used to say: “Looking back, I think my lack of provincial art training shoved me straight into modernism.”26 Hughes subsequently taught in Castleford, the mining hometown of the famous English sculptor Henry Moore, and in the small provincial town of Holmfirth. It was at this time that he recalls first experiencing intense colour in paint—notably at a gallery in Wakefield, where “he saw a painting by Patrick Heron and an abstract in blues by an artist whose name he could not recollect.”27 Teaching art and drama at Cobourg School in the Old Kent Road in London’s East End in the early 1950s, Hughes spent his free time meeting other artists, including Gillian Ayres, Harry (Henry) Mundy, Bernard Farmer, and Malcolm Morley, and visiting exhibitions at major galleries (Barbara Hepworth, Piet Mondrian) and the smaller commercial ones, where he would catch up with the continental modernists. Hughes had friends from Bretton Hall in Cyprus, but he was also associated with the region in other ways: his uncle had died in Turkey in the First World War and his brother had served in Cyprus in the Second World War. Thus, in 1956, he accepted a post at the Junior School in Nicosia. Because of his family’s working-class background, Hughes was liberal and progressive, nurtured with socialist ideals. Furthermore, although he was an artist who never hid his preference for men, with the male nude forming the basis for many of his abstract works, he was never marginalized in the then introverted and conservative Cyprus; on the contrary, he was always accepted socially. In an interview he gave in 2008, he said: “My works are more political than erotic. But not political in the sense of Left or Right, although I lean towards the Left. I don’t know; on the one hand, I am politicised but, on the other, I’m not. I’m just an artist.”28 Hughes’ eventual shift toward abstraction also had to do with his sexual orientation. In the same interview, he says: “I had realised my difficult role—that perhaps I was a homosexual—and this thought led to abstraction right away.”29 One could imagine that Hughes’ abstract (and volatile) universe harmoniously embodied his homoerotic aspirations. On a slow voyage by ship to Cyprus in that same year, the first revelation was the light. Glyn Hughes always remembered “the acute angles of pinks and oranges in the late afternoon of an unpolluted era in Athens,” and reaching Cyprus at dusk, where olive trees seemed to reach right down to the road from Limassol to Nicosia. From then on, he lived, worked, and painted in Cyprus. The island was not his second home; it became his home.

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Glyn—Christoforos: An Explosive Synergy In 1959, Glyn Hughes met the Cypriot painter Christoforos Savva. In Hughes’ own words: The first time I met Savva was in a little kebab shop with the blue walls near the bus station and I said: “There’s Savva.” I hadn’t been long here and it was nice to meet just like that someone who wasn’t English, Greek, Turkish or Armenian but just Savva the painter.30

Hughes’ words are indicative of the awkward multicultural situation as well as the ethnic tensions that prevailed in Cyprus at the end of British rule. The treaty for the establishment of the new postcolonial Republic of Cyprus included, in one way or another, the precondition of the “harmonious” coexistence of all these ethnic groups living on the island. On the one hand, Hughes expresses his admiration for Savva as an artist, and, on the other, he implies that Savva was liberal and cosmopolitan, contrary to the strong nationalistic tendencies of the time. Being a British citizen who happened to be in Cyprus in those troubled years, Hughes was likely treated with some suspicion. This continued for many years and perhaps contributed to the fact that he does not hold the right place in the Cypriot historiography of art. Another factor that contributed to this is the fact that he never learned Greek, allowing the conservative society of Cyprus to always consider him a “foreigner.”31 Regarding his close relationship with Savva, Hughes remembers: After we met, prior to Apophasis Gallery, Savva became my friend, but he was also my great inspiration. Our paths were parallel in the same direction. I was enriched from my studies and experiences during the 1950s abroad, I had Cyprus and I had Savva in those critical periods of geopolitical, cultural and economical turbulences … and that’s all I needed to move on.32

At that time, both artists exhibited almost simultaneously at the Ledra Palace Hotel (there were no professional galleries in Cyprus at the time). Hughes’ exhibition was held on December 12–16 while that of Savva on December 26–30, 1959. Hughes showed landscapes (village scenes) and total abstracts and in his notes writes of “how he looked at them all and decided not to paint a view again.”33 The close relationship between the two men, their common beliefs and visions, their needs and experimentations, their cosmopolitan and liberal artistic and personal imprint prompted them to live together at 6 Sophocleous Street, Nicosia, where they later established Apophasis 1 (Figure 5.1). As we will see further on, the next two years of synergy, and in particular 1962, will be one of the most prolific periods in both artists’ careers. Hughes and Savva were pioneers in breaking the mold of the island’s art scene and introducing Cyprus to a new and exciting way of comprehending art. Through their continuous artistic research and innovative actions, they laid the foundations for a

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Figure 5.1  Glyn Hughes and Christoforos Savva in the Courtyard of Apophasis Gallery 1 at Sophocleous Street. Photograph by Georges der Parthogh. Glyn Hughes Foundation, Nicosia, Cyprus.

conscious transition from the local to the global at the exact moment when art had begun to take an almost academic character. The synergy of the two artists constituted the explosive mixture that art in Cyprus needed in order to move forward. The unconventional artistic presence of Savva was already felt, both by artists and by Nicosians who seemed to be, or positioned themselves to be, more informed about art. One could even say that there was an even distribution of intensity, from the influence of his way of life and attitude toward things, as well as his pioneering achievements in art, such as his appliques, his cement reliefs, or his wire sculptures. Savva, who was characterized by many as having a distinctive innocence and even naivety, was fully informed about what was going on in the world and, in addition, as Hughes informs us, “he was very well read.”34 Hughes brought to Cyprus the cosmopolitan spirit of Great Britain of the 1950s and especially the London scene. Hughes finds in the 1960s Cyprus fertile ground to introduce his passionate and colourful artistic enthusiasm that had begun to shape before coming to the island. Also, despite the conservative views of the Cypriot society, the artist appears to feel more liberated not only in his art but also in his erotic preferences. In contrast to Great Britain, Hughes apparently felt quite comfortable in Cyprus and viewed the place as safe and discreet.

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For Ruth Keshishian, Hughes belongs to the imperialist tradition of men (and women) who feel sexually more comfortable abroad than in their homeland. Outside Britain, it was easier to practice their inclinations, as in the cases of Sir Harry Luke, Rupert Gunnis, and Aubrey de Sélincourt, among others, who felt liberated in Cyprus.35 As Hughes remembers: Coming to the Middle East has brought me into contact with minarets and domes and/or just my inner needs and preferences … that evidently had the same shapes. The personality of an individual who is ready to attack an empty canvas is directly related to one’s erotic tendencies and passion, which is intensified by colour and scent, by the view and the sound, by the culture and the politics, by the self and the self ’s ability to fall in love … and Cyprus had it all … so I stayed.36

Apophasis Gallery: The Blazing Years … With the establishment of Apophasis Gallery, a first attempt was made to give even a rudimentary “organizational structure” to what until then were scattered thoughts and visions of a group of young people who welcomed the 1960s: a period in which Cyprus was emerging from colonialism and entering a new democracy with the independence of the island. Savva’s genuinely folk way of thinking, combined with what he experienced and gained during his studies and wanderings in London and Paris, and Hughes’s Western, enthusiastic, and ground-breaking outlook were what Cyprus needed at that time. Their bohemian way of life, often bordering on poverty and penury, but also the embrace of intellectuals, young scientists and educated professionals, members of high society, foreign diplomats, and directors of Educational Institutions like Roger and Tatiana Milliex, created over the years an almost mythical framework for the Apophasis. The new Apophasis Gallery opened its doors in September 1960 at 44A Apollo Street. The first exhibition held there was the “Autumn Collection” with the works of seven Cypriot artists. Very soon, the Apophasis became an artistic hub with a dynamic presence that Nicosia needed so much at the time. Older and younger artists came together, showed their work, and exchanged views and ideas. Apart from the exhibitions, other important cultural events were also held at the gallery: lectures, discussions, theatre performances, literary and musical presentations. “With Savva’s socialist connections, there were speakers like the great Russian film director, Sergei Bondarchuk, and a photographic exhibition from the Hermitage Museum, in what was then Leningrad (not well received because it was not considered sufficiently ‘modern’).”37 It is important to emphasize at this point the multifaceted and versatile vision for Apophasis Gallery, as Hughes and Savva intended it. They did not want to establish just a gallery, but in fact a cultural centre that would bring together visual arts with all other art forms, a nucleus that would creatively gather all the intellectuals and art lovers of the time, not only Cypriots but also foreigners. One could argue that this was a common goal among most of the artist-run spaces in the Western world at

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the time, promoting exchange and experimentation between artists, based around notions of collectiveness and participation. “With their attitude of opposition toward the traditional art canon and their search for alternative forms of cooperation, those blazing the trail for progressive art tendencies very much resembled their predecessors, the avant-gardes of the early 20th century and institutions founded at that time such as the Wiener Secession.”38 Indeed, a lot of people visiting Cyprus would pass by the gallery. For example, in 1962, Marian Engel, one of the leading Canadian writers (1933–85), together with her husband, author of police novels, Howard Engel, was on the island and visited the gallery. Ruth Keshishian recalls the couple’s performance with a batik by Savva in the background as a set.39 In October 1961, the first joint exhibition of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot artists was organized, which was opened by Mrs. Souheila Kutchuk.40 Both Savva and Hughes believed in the need for peaceful coexistence between the two communities. In letters he had sent to his future wife, Christine, Savva writes: “All the problems we have with the Turks are due to the British diplomacy of ‘Divide and Rule.’ Five years ago, we did not have such problems. The Turks lived with us as a minority, now everything is changed.”41 Besides the exhibitions, the creative collaboration of the two co-founders of the gallery was continuous and fertile, with everyday quests and artistic pleasures. These quests were along the lines of what was happening internationally, during the revolutionary and experimental sixties and reminiscent of the early avant-garde pioneers of the twentieth century. Like-minded people with alternative lifestyles and practices formed groups, which challenged the status quo and traditional approaches to art. The founding core of Apophasis lived with art and for art, opening new ways of thinking and social interaction to the Cypriot public of the time. Costas Economou says that after the relocation of the Apophasis to 44A Apollo Street and after the “Autumn Collection” exhibition, the responsibility for the operation and the activities of the gallery remained exclusively with Christoforos Savva. Eleni Nikita writes the exact same thing: “Soon the new Apophasis will pass under Savva’s sole responsibility.”42 On the other hand, Savva’s wife writes that Savva thought of establishing a five-member committee to run the gallery.43 Nevertheless, reading Glyn Hughes’ accounts, it seems that 1960–2 was a period of extremely strong and prolific synergy between the two men, always centered on Apophasis Gallery. Hughes used to say: “That particular period of time deserves a socio-political analysis to justify reasons for acting and doing exactly what we did, just because we were in Cyprus and not somewhere else.”44 Apart from two personal exhibitions that they organized in 1961 in the Apophasis (Hughes on June 16–19, 1961, and Savva on November 18, 1961, and in June 1962), they also went on day trips to the countryside during that period. Hughes recalls: May 1962 was the most creative period of my career. I believe it was so for Savva. I passed from his studio and asked him if he wanted to go with me to the countryside. […] Savva suggested that perhaps we could explore the use of new materials and that was exactly what I had in mind. [The village of] Ayios Theodoros

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was full of “saccules” (sacks) everywhere and that was the perfect material for our introspective mood. I used it in a much different way than Savva. I was sort of complementing the picture with this material but Savva used it as if it was paint. I was mild with it but he was almost violent going all the way as I was with sand paint. That day we went back to Nicosia without speaking to one another. We isolated ourselves to listen inside of us. When I left him at his studio, he said to me: “same time tomorrow” and that was the beginning of a wonderful month.45

Indeed, in June 1962 Savva exhibited at the Apophasis Gallery a completely transformed work. These were mainly much more abstract works, most of which completely abstract, which express mental and emotional situations.46 Both Hughes and Savva were constantly informed about international developments in art, and their concern in relation to what was going on in the international arena persisted. The use of new materials, the overthrow of traditional techniques and means, and the conceptual aspect of art were a few of the issues with which they were concerned. They were also interested in Marcel Duchamp. In one of their excursions, Savva found in a barn two similar objects (perhaps being part of an old donkey saddle). One had the shape of a seventeenth-century pistol. As Glyn remembers: Savva placed it on a wooden base, resting on two nails, and called it Revolution. I asked him whether he was prepared to sign it and he did so reluctantly. It was interesting that he did because he thereby provoked an inside turbulence. The action gave rise to a readymade. Savva was not ready to be content with this alone and he had to complement this with a picture that was executed the same evening. Seeing the result the other day in his studio, I came to realize that our synergy was pushing things in the right direction. Savva produced a highly personal and emotional picture using the second object to complement the readymade. He called it Ayios Theothoros Η ΕΠΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΙΣ ΜΟΥ [=MY REVOLUTION]. The painting was dark and dramatic as if shooting oneself straight to one’s insides pushing the truth in white to go round in a vicious circle … spiritual and existential … and it was made I believe as a direct result of having placed himself into the historically significant position of signing a readymade.47

The tangible results of this close interaction between the two artists can be seen in a pair of works, which evolved around a shared visual experience, both of which are entitled The Athlete (Figure 5.2). In the mid of May 1962, they arrived at Ayios Theothoros village, where they noticed that there were games being held at the school. Glyn was inspired to work on a painting with sand and paint at lunchtime. The picture was figurative. Savva saw it and in the evening at his studio he worked on a totally abstract picture with sand, “saccules” (sacks) and paint. He called it The Athlete as well and this fact triggered a lively and inspired conversation between them. Glyn had seen the actual athlete but Savva had only seen Glyn’s painting. As Hughes evocatively states: “Such conversations that reminded us of university lunches, gave meaning and value to our relationship at a very personal level.”48

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Figure 5.2  Left: Glyn Hughes, The Athlete, 1962, Mixed media on canvas, 70 × 120 cm. Glyn Hughes Foundation, Nicosia, Cyprus. Right: Christoforos Savva, The Athlete, 1962, Mixed media on board, 37 × 120 cm. Photographs by Christos Avraamides. State Collection of Contemporary Art, Nicosia, Cyprus.

As it seems, May 1963 was a turning point in their close and distinctive relationship. Hughes recalls: I remember throwing a small piece of “sacculla” (sack) to him. It had a black circle on it that I made right there. Although he used it, he said to me firmly that the period of the “sacculles” (sacks) is over and that he was already somewhere else. He put it in my bag so I would remember the end of that (Figure 5.3).49

In July 1963, Christoforos Savva visited Israel and the famous Kibbutz Ein Harod, which houses one of Israel’s largest art museums. At that time, he began to correspond

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Figure 5.3  Christoforos Savva, Small Collage on Apophasis Gallery Letter Headed Paper, 1963, Collage, 26 × 12 cm. Photograph by Christos Avraamides. Glyn Hughes Foundation, Nicosia, Cyprus.

with Christine Waterhouse, whom he married in November 1964. In the early 1965, the Apophasis was closed and Savva and Christine moved to 2 Vyzantiou Street, Nicosia, although he continued to earn a living by working in the Apophasis tavern. In September 1965, his first child, Kika, was born.50 Savva’s life decisions along with the closing of the Apophasis clearly amounted to momentous changes in the lifestyle and creative process that Hughes had enjoyed for so long. Hughes evokes: “I lost him then for some time. My colours were different. I was applying objects, newspapers, shirts on my work, leading me politically to my seventies work … without Savva.”51 Christoforos Savva died in Great Britain after a short illness on July 13, 1968. He had just returned to Sheffield from Venice where he represented Cyprus in its first official participation in the 34th Venice Biennale together with other five artists. Glyn Hughes’ last memories of Savva are from 1967, their last contact being in July of that year: I saw Savva in the street late one evening on his way to Apophasis tavern. I told him that I wanted to invite a few friends to his place for my birthday on the 6th evening. Being his usual self, he didn’t reply as if to say, “OK” and he tells me that he is working on a couple of new works with new shapes and colours that he did not use before. He said that one of them he did not want to exhibit because it was too phallic (although he liked it nevertheless) and he wanted me to keep it as a present for my birthday (Figure 5.4). […] The painting was way ahead. It

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Figure 5.4  Christoforos Savva, 6|July h.b. glyn (Happy Birthday), 1967, Oil on canvas, 80 × 127 cm. Christoforos Savva’s birthday present to Glyn Hughes. On the back, Savva wrote in pencil: “6/july h.b. glyn.” Photo by Christos Avraamides. Glyn Hughes Foundation, Nicosia, Cyprus.

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was very pop almost Americanized with electric orange background and a huge phallic shape that was already appearing in my paintings of those times. However, such simplicity I would have reached … if I ever did … thirty years later … not counting my seventies period, which had the absolute simplicity of Savva’s last thoughts but not his colour. Perhaps, Savva felt that he had no time to waste and he cut a long story short.52

This colourful phallic painting was Savva’s last gift to Hughes. Glyn Hughes was admitted to a care home in Limassol in 2012. On October 23, 2014, he passed away at Limassol General Hospital, following a cardiac arrest. Glyn always treasured his valuable and creative relationship with Christoforos Savva and its tangible results. For about thirty years, he kept his collection with the works of Savva and his own, as well as all the related mementos and objects—irrefutable proof of their wonderful synergy during the years of their acquaintance—under lock and key. Hughes’ narratives on which this text was based were provided to his friends, artists Charalambos and Vaso Sergiou from May 1997 to May 1998. As mentioned before, May was very important to both Hughes and Savva.

Conclusion The foundation for the evolution of art on the island of Cyprus was laid in an important meeting, resulting in a crucial decision: to establish Apophasis Gallery. Its place in the then-new postcolonial Cyprus still influences the shape of the art community today. The personal relationship between two male artists, Glyn and Christoforos, the nature of which we will probably never understand fully, was a novel and radical leap toward the development of art in the country. In such a simple way, the first artist-run space in Cyprus was set up. Today’s proliferation of similar venues on the island, almost sixty years later, shows the immense importance and success of the two young artists’ works, Christoforos Savva and Glyn Hughes, who in 1960 joined their anxieties, concerns, and common visions, co-habiting creatively and urging, by personal example and through their artworks, the public to move toward the future. The important legacy of the Apophasis and its two co-founders—albeit short-lived—has essentially defined Cyprus’ visual arts course in perpetuity.

Notes Christoforos Savva and Glyn Hughes, “Apophasis Gallery,” Κυπριακά Χρονικά (Cyprus Chronicles) 1, no. 1 (1960): 24. 2 Ibid. 3 Yiannis Toumazis, Apophasis Gallery: Glyn Hughes and Christoforos Savva (Nicosia: NiMAC, forthcoming), 20. (Based on a written account of events as narrated by Glyn Hughes to Charalambos and Vaso Sergiou during the period May 1997–May 1998.) 1

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Evgenia Petronda, “Autumn Collection (‘Apophasis’ Gallery),” Νέα Εποχή (New Age) 21 (1960): 24. 5 This essay does not look into the art of Turkish Cypriots or that of artists of the other communities of Cyprus. 6 Yiannis Toumazis, 1960–1974: Young Cypriot Artists at the Dawn of the Republic (Nicosia: NiMAC, 2002). Exhibition catalogue, 13. 7 Yiannis Toumazis, “The Legacy of Tony Spiteris for the Cypriot Participations in the Venice Biennale,” in Cyprus in Venice 1968–2009: 40 Years in the Venice Biennale of Art, ed. L. Michaelidou and Y. Toumazis (Nicosia: Ministry of Education and Culture, Cultural Services and NiMAC, forthcoming). Exhibition Catalogue. 8 Gabriele Detterer, “The Spirit and Culture of Artist-Run Spaces,” in Artist-Run Spaces: Nonprofit Collective Organizations in the 1960s and 1970s, ed. Gabriele Detterer and Maurizio Nannucci (Zurich: JRP-Ringier, 2012), 11. 9 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, eds. The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Press, 1967). 10 Detterer, “The Spirit and Culture of Artist-run Spaces,” 10–11. 11 Ibid. 12 Eleni S. Nikita, Χριστόφορος Σάββα: Η Απαρχή μιας Νέας Εποχής στην Κυπριακή Τέχνη (Christoforos Savva: The Beginning of a New Era in Cypriot Art) (Nicosia: Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, 2008), 97. 13 Christine Savva-Duroe, “Christoforos Savva, as I Knew Him,” in Christoforos Savva: His Life and Work (Nicosia: Cultural Services, Ministry of Education, 1988), 10. 14 Ibid., 11–12; Nikita, Χριστόφορος Σάββα, 15. 15 Savva-Duroe, “Christoforos Savva,” 12. 16 Antonis Iliakis, “Διατελώ μετά τιμής Ηλιάκης”/’Yours Sincerely Iliakis’, interview by Meropi Moiseos, Παράθυρο, Politis Newspaper, November 11, 2013. 17 In a letter sent to Costas Economou from Paris (c. 1956), Savva mentions his friend Rosalind. She is probably the same person. Quoted in Savvas Christodoulides, Agapite Mou Koumpare: 12 Letters of Christoforos Savva Sent to Costas Economou. Publication on the occasion of the exhibition Planites for Pafos2017, Cultural Capital of Europe, curated by Elena Parpa (Pafos: Pafos2017, 2017), 36. 18 Nikita, Χριστόφορος Σάββα, 29. 19 Savva-Duroe, “Christoforos Savva,” 16–17. 20 Nikita, Χριστόφορος Σάββα, 32. 21 Christoforos Savva to Pantelis Michanikos, August 29, 1956, Maroula Michanikos Archive, in Nikita, Χριστόφορος Σάββα, 61. 22 Nikita, Χριστόφορος Σάββα, 70. 23 Ibid., 71. 24 Christodoulides, Agapite Mou Koumpare, 59. 25 Glyn Hughes and Charalambos Sergiou, Glyn Hughes (Nicosia: Glyn Hughes Foundation, 2005), 7–8. 26 Ibid., 7. 27 Ibid. 28 Glyn Hughes, interview by Christina Lambrou, Politis Newspaper, October 26, 2014. 29 Ibid. 30 Toumazis, Apophasis Gallery, 11. 31 Glyn Hughes, interview by Christina Lambrou, Politis Newspaper. 32 Toumazis, Apophasis Gallery, 15. 33 Ibid., 16. 4

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34 Hughes, Handwritten Notes for Christoforos Savva, early 1970s, 3. Charalambos and Vaso Sergiou Archive/Glyn Hughes Foundation. 35 Ruth Keshishian, email sent to Yiannis Toumazis, April 11, 2018. 36 Toumazis, Apophasis Gallery, 5. 37 Hughes, Handwritten Notes, 2. 38 Detterer, “The Spirit and Culture of Artist-run Spaces,” 13. 39 Ruth Keshishian, email sent to Yiannis Toumazis. 40 Nikita, Χριστόφορος Σάββα, 103–5. 41 Ibid., 120. 42 Costas Economou, “The Work of Christoforos Savva,” in Χριστόφορος Σάββα, ed. Eleni S. Nikita, 103. 43 Savva-Duroe, “Christoforos Savva,” 23. 44 Yiannis Toumazis, Texts for the major retrospective exhibition Glyn Hughes 1931–2014, organized by NiMAC, May 12, 2016–July 23, 2016 and September 23, 2016–December 17, 2016. 45 Toumazis, Apophasis Gallery, 29–30. 46 Nikita, Χριστόφορος Σάββα, 109. 47 Toumazis, Apophasis Gallery, 35–6. 48 Ibid., 39. 49 Ibid., 41. 50 Savva-Duroe, “Christoforos Savva,” 29; Nikita, Χριστόφορος Σάββα, 123. 51 Toumazis, Apophasis Gallery, 41. 52 Ibid., 43–4.

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Who Are We, Where Do We Come from, Where Are We Going to?: Writing Greek Cypriot Women’s Art Histories in Contemporary Cyprus Maria Photiou

Introduction In this chapter, I examine the ways in which art history is written in relation to Greek Cypriot women artists. The work of these artists has received little attention and has frequently been marginalized from official art histories. I will investigate some of the processes and conditions that affected Greek Cypriot women artists’ lives and careers. The chapter is based on research I carried out for my doctoral thesis at Loughborough University entitled Rethinking the History of Cypriot Art: Greek Cypriot Women Artists in Cyprus. This chapter focuses mainly on the work of Greek Cypriot women artists, principally due to the scarce availability of material on Turkish Cypriot art in English. I will address the socio-political conditions from which Greek Cypriot artists emerged, and the problematic position in which the artists were placed. These conditions were associated with patriarchy and nationalism. Several contemporary Greek Cypriot feminists explored this matter in their research: patriarchal society and national politics left no space for women in Cyprus to fight for their rights, to contest patriarchy, or to gain public visibility.1 Significant to my discussion is how the sociopolitical conditions affected Greek Cypriot women artists’ lives and careers. Within this context, I will use interview material to refine our understanding of how women artists responded to these socio-political conditions. Loukia Nicolaidou’s At the Fields (c.1933) and Rhea Bailey’s Memories of the Yard (1979) will be analyzed—their work underlines discourses related to gender relations and socio-political conditions in contemporary Cyprus. Title is taken from Rhea Bailey’s 1974 painting.

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Who Are We Perspectives on Writing Greek Cypriot Women Artists’ Histories Griselda Pollock, in Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories, defines “canon” as “a discursive formation which constitutes the objects/ texts it selects as the product of artistic mastery and, thereby, contributes to the legitimation of white masculinity’s exclusive identification with creativity and with culture.”2 As I will discuss in this chapter, the scholarly production of Cypriot art history appears to be formed according to a Westerner European male historical canon. In my discussion, I consider “canon” the establishment of the “fatherhood of Cypriot art” and the exclusion of women artists from official art histories. The establishment of this canon has been a key reference since the early available material on Cypriot art history. To study art and art history, Greek Cypriots commonly migrated from Cyprus, as academic training was not accessible before 1960.3 They pursued art education in European countries such as Greece, England, and France. According to Areti Adamopoulou, the close connection with Greece allowed a cultural exchange of ideas: “Since the 1970s Greek art historians and art critics have included twentieth-century Cypriot art in their purview and have narrated its history in similar terms.”4 Such terms of narration can be particularly problematic if we consider Cyprus’ complicated socio-political conditions, which were very different to Greece’s. Hubert Locher argues that the canon’s formation has to be considered a “social and political enterprise” that represents “sets of values deemed to be important for society as a whole, or for groups within it.”5 Considering the canon was key in constructing art history, we should not assume that artists in Cyprus experienced the same conditions as others did elsewhere. Cypriots having to deal with long occupations, followed by the anti-colonial struggle and the inter-communal conflict, have greatly affected the art sphere in all regions of Cyprus. The marginalization of art history resulted in a significant absence of academic book publications on art history in Cyprus. Such a limited body of literature is to be expected when we consider that Greek Cypriot women artists have not experienced the publicity or systematic attention to their work that other postcolonial artists, from countries such as India and Africa, have received.6 The first official account of modern and contemporary Cypriot art was compiled in 1977 by the Greek art professor Chrisanthos Christou and was first published in 1983 by the Cultural Services of the Ministry of Education in Cyprus. Christou, in his book Σύντομη ιστορία της νεότερης και Σύγχρονης Κυπριακής Τέχνης (A Brief History of Modern and Contemporary Cypriot Art), attempts to record early-twentieth-century Cypriot art. In his account, Christou includes references to a history of “fathers of Cypriot art” and employs analysis in terms of an evolution of generations. Christou positions the artists (and consequently their practice) according to the generations in which they belong, assuming that they experienced the same conditions and shared the same problems. The lack of critical analysis or consideration of major European trends makes his account problematic and greatly influences other researchers’ approaches to cultural production in Cyprus.

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Although his study is lacking in several elements, we must remember that when Christou wrote his book, no other books relating to Cypriot art or any artists’ monographs existed. Thus, Christou grouped the artists into three generations according to the dates on which they were born: the first generation was born between 1900 and 1922, the second was born between 1922 and 1940, and the third was born after 1940. According to Christou, the first generation was the “fathers and teachers of modern Cypriot art,” the second generation was the artists who were born during the First and Second World Wars, and the third generation was the artists born after the start of the Second World War. The term “fathers of modern Cypriot art” is broadly used in literature materials, exhibitions, and curatorial discourses.7 The fatherhood embodies two artists: Adamantios Diamantis (1900–94) and Telemachos Kanthos (1910–93), who are perceived as the founders of Cypriot art.8 Significantly, the establishment of such artistic affiliation allows little space for women, particularly within these limits of constructing the canon of Cypriot art history. Active during the same period as Diamantis and Kanthos was Loukia Nicolaidou (1909–94), who was considered the first professional9 Greek Cypriot woman artist. In his book, Christou did not mention Nicolaidou. It is possible that Nicolaidou was not renowned at the time (she had been absent from Cyprus for many years and thus Christou may not have been familiar with her work).10 Nicolaidou produced a body of work that, until recently, was unknown to audiences and was excluded by the male-privileged publications of Cypriot art history (her work is only mentioned in texts published after 1992, the year that her retrospective was held in Cyprus). It is worth noting that Nicolaidou was not the only woman artist of this period to be peripheral to Cypriot art;11 however, she was the first to receive publicity from the state’s cultural services, years after the cessation of her professional career.12 A number of contemporary art historians have challenged the term “fathers of Cypriot art” and instead use the term “first generation.” In their publications, they offer critical examinations of the works based on the influences they had.13 Nevertheless, the term “fathers of Cypriot art” provides “evidence for a need to determine the first ‘national’ artists and establish a strong linear (patriarchal) artistic ancestry.”14 To understand the absence of Greek Cypriot women artists in Cypriot art history, it is necessary to consider the socio-political conditions from which they emerged. Considering that being an artist was, for a long time, not an acceptable career15—or barely a choice—women’s approach to art as professional artists entering the public sphere (academic education, exhibiting, and selling their work) rather than as amateurs within the domestic sphere (practicing art as a pleasurable pastime while taking care of the children) affected women artists’ emergence in Cypriot art history. It is also important to consider the representation of women artists in exhibitions and curatorial practices. The State Gallery of Contemporary Cypriot Art chose to include three works of Nicolaidou and positioned them alongside the work of the “fatherhood of Cyprus art.” Nicolaidou is the only woman to be represented in that section. Significantly, a feminist approach was adopted for the 2010 womenonly exhibition Pioneer Women Artists in Greece and Cyprus, which was curated by Eleni Nikita and Athena Schina. The exhibition forms the best-documented Greek Cypriot women artists’ show, with an illustrative catalogue of work from these

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artists. Particularly interesting is Eleni Nikita’s essay titled Pioneer Women Artists in Cyprus, since this is the first record of establishing “pioneer” women artists in Cyprus. The essay includes names unknown to the audience. Nikita refers to seven women artists who are no longer alive and who were born in the first three decades of the twentieth century (during the British colonial rule): Persefoni T. Xenaki (1908–2000), Loukia Nikolaidou-Vassiliou (1909–93), Thraki Rossidou Jones (1920–2007), Pavlina Pavlidou (1922–93), Eleni Chariclidou (1926–78), Elli Ioannou (1929–2005), and Elli Mitzi (1930–97). After adopting a “socio-historical” approach, Nikita produced a reading based on shared “characteristics” among the seven artists.16 Nikita refers to the artists’ backgrounds as a common characteristic and explains that “all seven artists came from and lived in urban and cultivated backgrounds.”17 She also refers to their education (all of them gained education in European academies) and their careers in education (Xenaki, Chariclidou, Ioannou, and Mitzi) as art tutors. Their employment in education greatly affected their practice and their further involvement in art. In fact, Persefoni T. Xenaki and Eleni Chariclidou had only shown their work in group exhibitions, whereas Ioannou organized two solo exhibitions at a late age, toward the end of her artistic career.18 Elli Mitzi, however, took a different position, with frequent participation in group exhibitions and five solo exhibitions in Cyprus and abroad.19 Although these artists experienced the British colonial period in relatively different ways, they all have something in common: they were women living in a colonized, patriarchal country under Greek Cypriot nationality. In this, we find common patterns in their private and professional lives. Their actual choices were affected by society’s expectations of who they should be: the model role of wife-mother. It is not surprising that of the six members of the foremost generation of pioneering Greek Cypriot women artists, three never got married (Pavlidou, Chariclidou, Mitzi), one (Ioannou) divorced at a young age, and one (Xenaki) married at a late age.20 Likewise, soon after her marriage, Nicolaidou slowly abandoned her promising career. Nikita does not refer to specific gendered economies and instead assumes that women in Cyprus experienced the same conditions as other women did internationally. According to Maria Hadjipavlou, a feminist movement “never emerged in Cyprus as it did in other Western societies in 1960s. In fact, […] the struggle was against British colonialism, and […] [was] shaped and led by mainly right-wing Greek Cypriot men and the Greek Orthodox Church.”21 During the 1950s, the roles of Greek Cypriot women as wives, mothers, and caretakers of the home were changed by the active participation of women who fought in the anti-colonial struggle. This period saw widespread societal changes, first to social interactions and then to domestic regulations. Women’s relationship with the patriarchal order of domesticity was in flux, and the “moral code of honour” was significantly destabilized. Before the 1950s, during the years of struggle, the majority of Greek Cypriot women were only commonly seen in the public sphere for specific duties. But after the 1950s, women gained independence and the ability to act individually without needing to seek male permission. The exhibition’s Pioneer Women Artists in Greece and Cyprus approach of considering “another parameter”—that of gender—provides a stage for introducing to the audience women who were, until recently, invisible from official art histories. In addition,

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this women-only show is an instance of disruption in the canon of fatherhood, as it employs the term “pioneer,” which has historically been associated with an entirely male production. The emergence of the women-only show and its catalogue manifests a feminist perspective into the development and documentation of Cypriot art history.

Where Do We Come From? The British colonial period is a core moment in Greek Cypriot women’s art history, as we see for the first time the documented appearance of Greek Cypriot women artists. Before and during British Colonial rule in Cyprus, it was rare to meet a “professional” Greek Cypriot woman, and even more rare to meet a professional Greek Cypriot woman artist. The lack of art schools in Cyprus had the effect of isolating Cypriots from the radical European movements, and artists had to immigrate to other European countries to receive education. Loukia Nicolaidou is a paradigmatic artist of the period whose persistent practice, with solo exhibitions in the 1930s, paved the way to a profession previously unavailable to women: that of the artist. After her training in Paris, Nicolaidou returned to Cyprus in 1933 and embarked on a period of rich artistic production, which resulted in three solo exhibitions in 1934, 1935, and 1936. In becoming artists, women in Cyprus challenged the socio-political and cultural codes of Cyprus’s patriarchal society. Emphasizing gendered discourses within sociopolitical histories offers a mechanism to explore how women artists negotiated their positions as makers of culture in Cyprus. In the following discussion, I will argue that Nicolaidou produced politicized accounts of femininity. Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker state that by the nineteenth century femininity “was to be realized exclusively in child-bearing and child-raising.”22 Women artists were “not only subjected to the institutional restraints of the developing nuclear family but also to the assumption that […] the natural form their art would take was the reflection of their domestic femininity.”23 Nicolaidou introduced an art practice in the 1930s that was radical from the artworks created by her male contemporaries. While in most Greek Cypriot men’s depictions women are represented as mother-wife, Nicolaidou’s depictions show a rather undomesticated side of women in Cyprus. Countryside scenes, such as that represented in At the Fields (c.1933) (Figure 6.1), are an interesting setting for representing encounters between cultural transition for tradition and modernity. The image has two scenes: one in the background and the other in the foreground. In the background, five women, dressed in traditional Cypriot outfits (with scarfs around their heads and their bodies fully covered by long faded dresses), are walking away after working long hours in the fields. While the women in the background are represented with abstract facial characteristics that show tiredness from carrying the daily harvest, the women in the foreground (the focus of the painting) are depicted in much more detail. The scene in the foreground is in opposition to the scene in the background. The two girls in the foreground are posing in light modern dresses, and they appear to be in a “different world”—a world of their own, far away from the other women in the

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Figure 6.1  Loukia Nicolaidou, At the Fields, c.1933, oil, measurements not known. Artist’s Family Collection. Image courtesy of En Tipis Publications.

painting. While one girl sits on a small stool eating watermelon, the other girl lies on the ground in a sensual pose. Her pose recalls Jean Ingres’s lounging odalisques in his Orientalist work. Here the Cypriot girl, while engaging the viewer with her gaze, is relaxing with one hand on her head and the other hand touching the girl next to her. The foreground scene is depicted by tan and dark brown colours, which contrasts the white dress of the seated girl. Here, Nicolaidou emphasizes the girls’ femininity by using loose corporeal outlines and by drawing particularly expressive details on their faces. Her method changes for the depiction of the women in the background, with the looseness of the brushwork reducing the figures to anonymous faceless objects. This technique is similar to Nicolaidou’s earlier Post-Impressionist work (e.g., Lucien Simon’s Atelier and Milliners), where she constructs a visual reference to her subject matter, providing details of action (i.e., working in the fields) rather than of the figures themselves. This image reveals Nicolaidou’s strategy in representing the social-political change that occurred during British rule. In this visual, Nicolaidou integrates the ordinary Cypriot everyday life of the working class with certain modern attitudes adopted by Cypriots during the colonial period. The background scene represents the older generation of women—the ones who lived in rural areas and followed the traditional customs according to the patriarchal society. This is the generation that is greatly associated with the domestic sphere, with public appearances relating only to religious functions or working in the family’s fields. However, at the same time, Cypriot customs were undergoing gradual changes, and a new lifestyle was being adopted by several

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Cypriot women. The two girls presented indicate this change—they represent the generation of women who will embark on education and employment in the public sphere. This image is a remarkable illustration of Greek Cypriot women’s status, representing both the tradition and the modernity of Cypriot culture. Nicolaidou’s image of the two girls can also read as a representation of women’s sexual liberation and gradual transition to the public domain. The engagement of the viewer through the gaze of the sensual girl positions the spectator as an eyewitness to women’s disjunction from patriarchal stereotypes. Elena Stylianou and Nicos Phillippou write that “Nicolaidou’s negotiations of female sexuality, either in an aggressively direct confrontation with the viewer or in an indirect defiance that reclaims a monumental integrity and presence, speak of a society that is increasingly progressive, changing, open, and searching for a new self-image, as well as for its place in an international and cosmopolitan milieu.”24 Nicolaidou’s work offers testimony to the social-economic changes that occurred in Cyprus during British rule and, in particular, to women’s attitudes toward British influence. Her images reflect these changes—this is something that her male contemporaries and traveling British artists25 avoided in their work. A considerable amount of Greek Cypriot women, particularly young girls, adopted the latest European fashions. Mrs Esme Scott-Stevenson testified in 1879 that “shops full of European goods have taken the place of the old bazaars; and one sees more people in English than Greek costume.”26 While most men presented Cyprus and its people in a traditional way, Nicolaidou presented Cyprus and its people in both a traditional and modern way. Her role as an “insider” (a young Greek Cypriot woman) and also as an “outsider” (an artist who returned to Cyprus after experiencing European trends and life) is obvious in her representations of Cyprus. Unlike other women artists, who participated exclusively in group exhibitions, Nicolaidou aspired to establish her professional status as an independent artist. The experience of a Cypriot woman attempting to make a living through painting and by exhibiting her work was somewhat difficult in patriarchal Cyprus, particularly since her shows happened during a period where no exhibiting facilities were available, and the support of collectors and dealers was significantly scarce. Not surprisingly, the public remained indifferent toward Nicolaidou’s onewoman show. Nonetheless, the first ever one-woman show in Cyprus’ history, held in 1934 at Papadopoulos Hall (Nicosia), attracted the attention of intellectual reviewers, such as journalists Proinos and Pan. Proinos referred to Nicolaidou as a “genuine artist of a genuine artistic talent”27 who overcame the socio-cultural prejudices of the time by negotiating her status as professional artist. According to the 1934 reviews, the exhibition included many portraits and landscapes, and two female nudes. The public remained apathetic about the originality of Nicolaidou’s technique and her ability to represent a range of subjects through bright colors and bold brushwork. Journalist Pan attempted to explain the originality of her work while writing about the public’s apathy: The artist is disappointed. Seated all day long at a small sofa she observes the few visitors who come to see the exhibition and leave without showing any kind of

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appreciation to her. […] Why the wealthy people, our elite class—the word has lost its meaning—are so ignorant, so unaware and so uncultured? […] Who, of the wealthy ones, went to the exhibition to buy an outstanding and valuable work to decorate his lounge and replace his wife’s pictures of actors? […] No, sirs, it is our mistake. We are unable to understand things that are superior to the ephemeral emotions of the cinema and football.28

Pan’s article offers significant information about Nicolaidou’s position as a woman artist in the colonial period and the art milieu of the time. According to Pan, the public (he is addressing wealthy people, who could afford to purchase art) remained apathetic toward a modernistic outlook that contrasted with what they preferred and were familiar with, such as landscapes and realistic portraits. The fact that Nicolaidou’s practice did not follow the mainstream genres of the time was perceived as her inadequacy to master the academic canon. However, Nicolaidou was aware of the public’s attitude and countered it by including in her 1934 exhibition two nudes that had been created during her study years. The two nudes were not part of the exhibition and so were displayed unframed to demonstrate to the public that her practice was a product of academic training fused with individual modernism, positioning herself as a woman artist in a patriarchal society.

Where Are We Going to? Even though post-independent Cypriot society had remained fairly constant in terms of certain patriarchal structures, there had been certain outlets for women to negotiate their status in society. Possibly the most significant outlet was public education,29 which functioned as a fundamental mechanism for future generations to raise awareness of women’s issues while embarking on full-time employment. Within this period, a significant number of women artists emerged in Cyprus who, in order to become artists, had to negotiate certain issues, such as their choice to practice art professionally, their relationship with their partners, and the ongoing politics of the time. In the next discussion, I examine some common working patterns that women artists negotiated in order to support themselves, their families, and their art. Rhea Athanassiades Bailey (b. 1946), a Greek Cypriot artist trained in the UK, has produced a politically motivated work exposing social, political, and cultural issues in post-independent Cyprus. I am using Bailey’s work as an example to explore gender relations and socio-political conditions in post-independent Cyprus. In Memories of the Yard (1979) (Figure 6.2), Bailey presents four figures in the yard of a house. The image portrays a young couple along with a man, a girl, and various plants. High white and blue walls define the space, while an elongated path leads to a black door. The image seems almost surreal when we compare the height of the house to its door and the figures. In the foreground of the image are depicted four images with light shades of white and grey colours. The figures—a married couple on their wedding day, a seated man, and a young girl—are facing the viewer. All the figures are taken from Bailey’s family album: the bride and groom are her parents, the seated man is her grandfather,

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Figure 6.2  Rhea Baily, Memories of the Yard, 1976, oil on canvas, 66cm × 66cm, State Gallery of Contemporary Art, Nicosia. Image courtesy of the artist.

and the young girl is her mother’s sister.30 The scene takes place in the secluded garden of Bailey’s ancestral home in Ayios Kassianos, in old Nicosia. By referencing images taken from the family album, Bailey indicates a past that is still alive in some ways. As Bailey explains, “Their energies […] are left in the garden and the house although they have all left.”31 The couple is shown in wedding outfits, most probably from a photo taken on their wedding day. Both are standing and looking down upon the viewer. I propose that by presenting an image of a wedding and, in particular, the image of a wedding dress, Bailey is portraying a women’s transition into her new role as wife and mother. The reference to the wedding is of particular importance when we consider the way partnership in Mediterranean cultures follows patriarchal conventions and traditional practices such as the “culture of gossip.”32 The “culture of gossip,” a product of the patriarchal society, is connected to women’s subordination in both the public and private sphere. Myria Vassiliadou argues that “the ‘culture of gossip’ concentrates on sexual

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morality, chastity, virginity, dowry, home cleanliness, upbringing of children, church going, dress code, weight, make-up, extra-marital affairs, and pre-marital affairs.”33 Like other women in Cyprus, women artists had to negotiate their role as autonomous individuals simultaneously with the social expectations of their domestic roles. In the following discussion, I will examine Bailey’s representation of the yard as a transitional space between the house and public life: “Usually opening off the kitchen, it is more public in nature, for it is attached to the house yet outside it. Whether it fronts onto the street or faces other porches to the rear of the house, it serves as a means of connecting the house to public life.”34 Post-independent Cyprus endorsed full-time employment for women. This was a massive challenge for the patriarchal society since the change formulated an open channel for women to enter the public sphere. While full-time employment set women in the public domain, it also exposed them to the “threat of the dirty house.”35 As Myria Vassiliadou notes: “Dilemmas are posed in these women’s lives since they need to work in order both to contribute to the household income (and to be ‘modern’ and ‘Western’), whereas at the same time the family needs to be looked after (by women) and the house to be kept clean.”36 While entering the public domain and seeking a career-oriented future, women found themselves in a double role between the privacy of the house and the exposure of the street. Bailey’s representation of the “house” and the “yard” acts as a transition between the domestic and the public. Significantly, the seated man’s posture recalls the style of photographs taken in 1960s studios. Such photographs were usually taken by professional photographers in town, to be kept as memories in the family album. By referencing an image taken from the family album, Bailey indicates a past that is still alive in some ways. While entering the public domain as art teachers and seeking a professional career, women artists found themselves in a double role: that of making a living and looking after their family and household. Rhea Bailey’s words are especially revealing in relation to her work position as a woman artist in postcolonial Cyprus: When I came back to Cyprus in 1970 I had to work in order to have an income. The only available work was to teach art. Once I graduated I was supposed to be a professional artist but being just that is not easy. Only if you are a really well known artist you can make a living, otherwise it is hard to survive exclusively from your art.37

This was a similar pattern for all artists: financial necessities forced them to seek employment in education. Given the increase in school numbers, there was a significant demand for art teachers. Artist Katy Stephanides (1925–2012) recalls: “There was large demand for art teachers […] The years that followed were creative but also tiring. I had to balance work at school with raising two children and painting […] But they were not easy years. Working filled my need to earn a living; painting filled a need deep inside me. And there was also my family.”38 Women’s employment in education had a lasting effect on their art, particularly since there was limited time for them to dedicate to their practice. Their roles as full-

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time art teachers and, outside of work, as full-time mothers and wives had effects on their artistic careers, as they could not practice methodically: I used to travel around Cyprus for my teaching position and I detested it. I became a Sunday painter; the only day I could dedicate to my art. I used to sketch during days and then work on it on Sundays or holidays. My work was no longer a spontaneous one, my paintings were made in stages and I was always adding elements on it. I remember one work was equivalent to one month. Within a year I had an average of twelve paintings. I used to feel odd about this […] Then, I was dealing with students and had to travel long distances that made me feel exhausted. I was not able to continue at the same pace as before. Teaching deterred my focus in art.39

The practical problem of making a living became a major factor for the limitation of artistic production in Cyprus. This was common for both men and women artists, who had to take art teaching jobs in order to surpass their precarious economic situation. In addition, while fostering women’s education and employment, postIndependent Cyprus failed to develop gender equality and harmony in partnerships with regards to domestic chores and the raising of children. Was there a possibility that the husband could take care of the children or do the chores so that the wife could have some time for art? Maybe, but within a patriarchal culture, working women had to struggle, particularly with their problematic transitions between the private and public spheres. British-born artist Pauline Phedonos (b. 1934), who married a Cypriot man, emphasizes the necessity of one’s need for tranquility in order to produce art: I wanted very much to paint […] I just didn’t have the time to do it. That was the problem, when you have your mind all to the children and the house or you have to buy the shopping. This is one of the reasons why women have not produced so much in Cyprus […] I think it’s very difficult when you are doing all these other things to produce. You need energy. You need mental and physical energy to create. If you don’t have it you can’t create. That’s the problem. Men do it. Men don’t bother at all about anything. We have to put up with all these things in Cyprus.40

Domestic relationships have a significant role on how women operate as maternal artists. For some women, the family is one of the major factors in how they establish themselves as professional artists. Significantly, if there is support within the domestic network, it is easier for women artists to produce art: After getting married, I was lucky to have a mother-in-law willing to take care of the house, so that I could dedicate time to pottery. […] My mother-in-law used to take care of the children and to prepare meals for us. I used to play with the children and “my clay.” She was young and she was enjoying taking care of the house, so I had the opportunity to work as a professional artist.41

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On the other hand, if there is only limited support from the family, women artists must deal with some intriguing tensions between motherhood and creativity. While certain social patterns did change and women gained access to art education, the full status of the artist was not granted to them easily. Women’s long association with the domestic sphere left little time for women artists to dedicate themselves to making art or establishing a career. This was, of course, a tension experienced by women artists around the world. For example, French artist Sonia Delaunay’s (1885–1979) words reveal this tension: “I have had three lives: one for Robert, one for my son and grandsons, and a shorter one for myself. I have no regrets for not having been more concerned with myself. I really didn’t have the time.”42 The lack of support for women has been stated by a number of authors. Art historian Linda Nochlin refers to her own experience: I was exhausted so often, I believed, because I wasn’t well-organised enough to juggle housework […], childcare, husband, teaching, and graduate studies, while also commuting […]. I didn’t consider the fact that organised childcare arrangements were nonexistent and women were supposed to run the household singlehanded even if they were professionals. […] There was no system or moral or practical support for women like me […] just unbounded personal energy and a will to persist under different circumstances.43

Certain social and private attitudes that say “women’s primary place” is the domestic sphere act as obstacles to women’s production and establishment of careers. Critical to this argument is the fact that, as Maria Hadjipavlou points out: “the social and psychological obstacles to women’s participation in high professional positions, in politics and at the decision-making level, include a social attitude that ‘women’s place is primarily in the home’, inadequate education and training, few positions allocated for women, lack of support from other women and the family and a fear of handling power.”44 As Virginia Woolf wrote in her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, it is a necessity for a woman to have financial autonomy and a personal space where she can work without distractions related to domestic chores. Phedonos describes the necessity of having a room of her own without family interventions: I built the house in Pafos, which I did myself; I didn’t show it to my husband until I had finished it, even if he is an architect. Otherwise it would have been “no, we do not need three bathrooms, no we do not need this or that.” I did it because I wanted to have a space somewhere that was mine […] The only thing was to build a place where I could feel that it was mine and I never let [my husband] use that room.45

Throughout the post-1960 years, women artists had to negotiate their roles in order to successfully tread the fine line between their social conditions and their identity as women artists.

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Conclusion The histories and images examined here provide an approach from which to look at women’s conditions and negotiations as artists in Cyprus. In this, I aim to offer a radical reflection and to understand specific histories of women artists and their artistic interventions in relation to their experiences and gendered encounters that affected their personal and professional lives. Such conditions are those that have engendered women artists to claim professional status and to produce art against all odds while living in a patriarchal, nationalist, and military country. I began this chapter by introducing British colonial rule as a key historical period, where we see for the first time the documented appearance of Greek Cypriot women artists. Equally important is Cyprus’ 2004 accession to the European Union, which offered artists the opportunity to become involved in European activities and to shift tight domestic networks and cultivate exchanges with the international community. The younger contemporary generation of Greek Cypriot women artists are actively involved with the international milieu. Among this generation are artists such as Marianna Christofides and Haris Epaminonda, who are based in Germany and have represented Cyprus in the Venice Biennale.46 In the twenty-first century, we find women artists operating not only individually but also in collective groups—for example, the Washing-Up Ladies. Greek Cypriot women artists Lia Lapithi and Marianna Kafaridou, after years of individual practice, came together in 2007 to form a feminist artistic act that exposes gender discrimination and the undervalued feminist issues in Cyprus. A new art history is in the making: one that offers the possibility of articulating women’s conditions and negotiations as artists in Cyprus. I hope this research will contribute to further publications on women artists. I also hope that future publications will include women artists from Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities. This will allow us to review an interactive process of women’s art history in Cyprus.

Acknowledgments This chapter is derived, in part, from an article published in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal on November 5, 2012, which is available online at the following link: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00497878.2012.718691. For the completion of this research, I am grateful to all the artists who provided me access to their work and took the time to discuss it with me. I am thankful to Robert Cutillo for all his support and for the editing of my text.

Notes 1

I particularly refer to the work produced by Maria Hadjipavlou and Myria Vassiliadou.

116 2 3 4

5

6 7

8 9

10

11 12 13

14 15

Contemporary Art from Cyprus Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), 9. The Cyprus College of Art, one of the first art institutions in Cyprus, was founded in 1969. Areti Adamopoulou, “Born of a Peripheral Modernism. Art History in Greece and Cyprus” in Art Histories and Visual Studies in Europe, ed. Matthew Rampley, Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher, Andrea Pinotti, Charlotte Schoell-Glass, and C.J.M. Kitty (Zijlmans: Brill Publisher, 2012), 379-391. Hubert Locher, “The Idea of the Canon and Canon Formation in Art History”, in Art Histories and Visual Studies in Europe, ed. Matthew Rampley, Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher, Andrea Pinotti, Charlotte Schoell-Glass, and C.J.M. Kitty (Zijlmans: Brill Publisher, 2012), 29-40. Tina Sherwell accounts for such comparison in relation to Arab women artists in Fran Lloyd (ed.), Contemporary Arab Women’s Art: Dialogues of the Present (London: Women’s Art Library, 1999), 58. Referring to the State Gallery of Contemporary Cypriot Art, Theopisti StylianouLambert and Alexandra Bounia write that when visiting the gallery one “Cannot Help but Notice That the History of Cypriot Art Is Synonymous with the Work of Male Greek Cypriot Artists,” in The Political Museum: Power, Conflict, and Identity in Cyprus (London: Routledge, 2016), 192. Chrisanthos Christou, Σύντομη ιστορία της νεότερης και Σύγχρονης Κυπριακής Τέχνης (A Brief History of Modern and Contemporary Cyprus Art). Nicosia: Cultural Services of the Ministry of Education in Cyprus, 1983. I use the term “professional” to define artists who chose to market and exhibit their work on a regular basis. Throughout the chapter, I refer to “professional women artists” to emphasize women’s position and approach in producing art against all odds. Christou refers a small number of women of the second and third generations. There is a distinct difference in Christou’s account of women and men artists: he refers to women artists only briefly, providing details such as their names and where they studied; the male artists, meanwhile, are discussed in much greater detail. Other women artists active during the same period are Persefoni T. Xenaki, Thraki Rossidou Jones, Pavlina Pavlidou, Eleni Chariclidou, Elli Ioannou, and Elli Mitzi. Loukia Nicolaidou’s work was revealed by art historian Eleni Nikita in 1992—the year when The State Gallery of Contemporary Cypriot Art organized a retrospective exhibition of Nicolaidou’s work. See especially, Antonis Danos, “Twentieth-Century Greek Cypriot Art: An ‘Other’ Modernism of the Periphery,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 32, no. 2 (October 2014): 217–52; Eleni Nikita, “Pioneer Women Artists in Cyprus,” in Pioneer Women Artists in Greece and Cyprus (Nicosia: Alpha Art Publications, 2010); and Elena Stylianou and Nicos Philippou, “Greek-Cypriot Locality: (Re) Defining Our Understanding of European Modernity,” in A Companion to Modern Art, ed. Pam Meecham (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2018). Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert and Alexandra Bounia, The Political Museum: Power, Conflict, and Identity in Cyprus (London: Routledge, 2016), 183–4. Artist Stass Paraskos writes on the artists’ struggles within social practices: “A few years back art was not considered a respectable profession. You couldn’t persuade a bank manager to give you a loan if you were a painter or a sculptor. The late Mr Kanthos, as a young man in Famagusta, was embarrassed to say he was an artist and

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Diamantis, in early days, used to describe himself as a teacher.” Preface from the exhibition invitation Family Circle, 2005. 16 Nikita writes: “My approach of the subject of a woman’s creativity in Cyprus will be done through a socio-historical outlook, remaining closer to Rozsika Parker’s saying ‘Art has no gender, artists do’,” in Eleni Nikita, “Pioneer Women Artists in Cyprus,” in Pioneer Women Artists in Greece and Cyprus (Nicosia: Alpha Art Publications, 2010), 30. 17 Ibid., 32. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 34. 21 Maria Hatzipavlou, Women and Change in Cyprus: Feminisms and Gender in Conflict (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 27. 22 Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistress: Women, Art and Ideology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 99. 23 Ibid. 24 Elena Stylianou and Nicos Philippou, “Greek-Cypriot Locality: (Re) Defining our Understanding of European Modernity,” in A Companion to Modern Art, ed. Pam Meecham (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2018), 353. 25 I refer to the work of William Hawkins, Keith Henderson, and Glady Peto. For more information, see Rita C. Severis, Travelling Artists in Cyprus 1700–1960 (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2000). 26 Quoted in Rita C. Severis, Travelling Artists in Cyprus 1700–1960 (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2000), 177. 27 Proinos, “A Genuine Artist,” in Proini, April 22 (1934) [Original text in Greek, translation mine]. 28 Pan, “Painting,” in Proini, April 26 (1934) [Original text in Greek, translation mine]. 29 Considering that elementary education became compulsory only in 1962, and the first three years in secondary education became free of charge ten years later, it is remarkable that in 1974 Cyprus ranked amongst the countries with the highest rates of literacy. Cyprus Social Research Centre. Cypriot Woman Rise and Downfall (Nicosia: Printing Office of the Republic of Cyprus, 1975), 7. 30 Communication with Rhea Bailey, January 23, 2018. 31 Ibid. 32 I borrow this term from Myria Vassiliadou. A Struggle for Independence: Attitudes and Practices of the Women of Cyprus (University of Kent at Canterbury, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 1999), 168. 33 Ibid., 170. 34 Jill Dubisch, Gender and Power in Rural Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 201. 35 I borrow this title from Myria Vassiliadou, “Women’s Construction of Women: On Entering the Front Door,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 5 (May 3, 2004). 36 Vassiliadou, “Women’s Construction of Women: On Entering the Front Door,” 56. 37 Interview with Rhea Bailey. Nicosia, September 21, 2010. 38 Marina Stephanides, Katy Phasouliotis Stephanides (Nicosia: En Tipis Publications, 2009), 31. 39 Interview with Rhea Bailey. Nicosia, September 21, 2010. 40 Interview with Pauline Phedonos. Nicosia, December 30, 2010. 41 Interview with Nina Iacovou. Nicosia, December 14, 2009.

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42 Quoted in Uta Grosenick, Women Artists in the 20th and 21st Century (London: Taschen, 2001), 98. 43 Linda Nochlin, “Starting from Scratch: The Beginnings of Feminist Art History,” in Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader, ed. M. Reilly (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015), 191–2. 44 Hadjipavlou, Women and Change in Cyprus, 10. 45 Interview with Pauline Phedonos. Nicosia, December 30, 2010. 46 Marianna Christofides represented Cyprus in 2011 and Haris Epaminonda in 2007.

7

Nicosia’s Queer Art Subculture: Outside and Inside Formal Institutions Marilena Zackheos and Nicos Philippou

Introduction In the last decade, Nicosia has established a dynamic art culture supporting a range of arts-related events, such as festivals, literary readings, workshops, exhibitions, live music and dance, as well as theatrical productions. This artistic vitality concurs with the regeneration of a city center, which was largely neglected following the 1974 division of Cyprus. Within Nicosia’s rich art scene has also emerged a queer art subculture with aesthetics and practices that challenge heteronormativity, transgress strict social boundaries, and acknowledge queer lives, outlooks, and struggles. Our chapter charts this art subculture by focusing on the ways in which five artistic and curatorial cases—Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio (2009), Re Aphrodite’s At Maroudia’s (2012), Despina Michaelidou’s participation in Urban Drag and Small Homelands (2014), and Paola Revenioti’s Correction (2014 and 2015)—have made use of space in Nicosia, including formal and informal institutions, moving either into the backstreet and the clandestine or out of these and into the established. Exploring how this queer art subculture orientates itself sexually but also spatially enables an archiving of this particular scene within contemporary art discussions in Cyprus and abroad, extends the dialogue on the relation of subcultures to mainstream art production, and provides an evaluation of the sociocultural changes in conflict-affected Nicosia.

New Life in the Old City: Urban Regeneration and the Flourishing Art Scene The relatively recent artistic and cultural effervescence of Nicosia coincides with the city’s urban regeneration initiated by the municipalities of both the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities in 1979 through the Nicosia Master Plan, the implementation of which continues to this day. The rehabilitation and re-use of historic

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buildings, the upgrading of public infrastructure, the establishment of social inclusion programs, the creation of multifunctional spaces, and the redevelopment of neglected locations are some of the mutually agreed-upon principles for regenerating Nicosia north and south of the Buffer Zone.1 The project aims to attract families and investors in the city center by improving living conditions and facilities but also gestures toward blocking further stagnation in a divided Nicosia and eventually realizing a unified and developed capital. Art has blossomed in the city from the 1980s onwards. During the 1980s and 1990s, artists moved their studios into previously abandoned workspaces and abodes in the center.2 The State Gallery of Contemporary Cypriot Art was inaugurated in 1990 at a restored historic building just outside the walled city. The Nicosia Municipal Arts Center was in turn founded in 1994 and housed within the renovated Old Powerhouse, with a mission to connect Cypriot artists with overseas artists and cultural managers.3 Beginning 2002 until 2011, the Nicosia Open Studios initiative invited visitors to enter artist studios north and south of the border. Factors other than urban regeneration can also explain the blossoming of the arts in the Old City. Cheap rent allowed artists to move in. That old Nicosia was in a semi-abandoned state was in turn alluring to artists who defined themselves as nonmainstream. Living and working in old Nicosia and staying clear from commercial areas were a statement of anti-conformism and perhaps even romanticized the margins. Many of these studios have now shut down but the art culture continues to grow unscathed in the city. Within the last decade especially, there has appeared a shift from privatization to municipalization and collectivization. From artist-led spaces like Thkio Ppallies and Phytorio to artist collective shops like Phaneromenis 70 to contemporary art galleries like The Office, there are a range of spaces that actively host creative initiatives through which subcultures have emerged and are sustained. The Open Mic Nights hosted by the non-profit writing center Write CY have for instance managed to assemble a devout following of both Hellenophone and Anglophone readers, writers, and listeners each month over drinks at Prozac Café, a coffee-shopcum-bar that functions additionally as an alternative reading and arts space. Thkio Ppalies, located in a former garage in the residential area of Pallouriotissa, is led by a group of artists sharing their visual and musical experimental projects. In turn, new lavish formal institutions like the A.G. Leventis Gallery and the Center for Visual Arts and Research have opened (both in 2014), with a warm reception from the general public, hosting permanent and temporary exhibitions but also public lectures, book launches, literary readings, and even theatrical productions.4 Interestingly, in these formal and informal art spaces, the visual is often mixed with the auditory as well as the kinetic revealing an inclination toward multipurpose spaces that can assemble a range of event-goers—assuming a stance of greater inclusivity for all—but also pointing to an interest to explore bodily expression at its fullest potential. Noteworthy too is the fact that formal art institutions such as the Nicosia Municipal Arts Center (NiMAC) and the Ethnological Museum have been embracing subcultures, enabling them to cross over into mainstream culture by hosting subcultural artistic production in their spaces.

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It is usually the case that regeneration homogenizes the urban experience, pushing out minorities and even artists who seek inexpensive work spaces but in the case of Nicosia and notably the walled city, the locale and social geography remains varied. The walled city has many faces. Ledras and Onasagorou, two bustling pedestrianonly streets that cut through the Old City, are very popular destinations for a family stroll and host many well-known franchised department stores, restaurants, ice cream parlours, and boutiques. Only a couple hundred meters away toward the east side of the walled city, Trikoupi Street—now referred to by locals as “Arab Street”—hosts the only mosque in operation south of the Buffer Zone as well as various establishments that cater for the culinary and cultural needs of immigrants from the Middle East and the Subcontinent including halal butcher-stores, falafel joints, and Indian and Pakistani CD shops. Similarly, west of Ledras and around the Holy Cross Catholic Church, the Filipino community has a visible presence with its own corresponding establishments. Furthermore, neighborhoods like Taktakalas and Chrysaliniotissa are purely residential and have seen the implementation of state or municipal regeneration programs designed to revitalize abandoned neighborhoods by attracting young families. As a counterweight to regeneration, anarchist groups and political subversives in turn make their presence visible through protest, graffiti, and street parties especially in and around Phaneromeni Square. To come to the point, urban regeneration in Nicosia has not reached the extent yet to entirely homogenizing the Old City into a commercialonly area, allowing pockets of diversity to coexist and flourish.

Subcultures, Queerness, and the Mainstream It is this multiplicity and fluidity of the Old City that we propose offer a built and social landscape that allows room for artistic and curatorial experimentation. Nicosia thus offers a fertile ground and acts as an ideal backdrop for the local emerging queer art scene to render itself visible. This is a scene, which so far demonstrates a tactical flexibility in its use of space and institutions as it fluidly moves from informal to formal venues and from the clandestine to the highly visible. Works—forming part of the queer art subculture that we seek herein to trace—that stayed clear of formal institutions include Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio exhibited at Apotheke in 2009 and Despina Michaelidou’s Urban Drag and Small Homelands shown at The Space Next to Kala Kathoumena in 2014. In contrast, Re Aphrodite’s At Maroudia’s, which was organized at the Ethnological Museum in 2012, and Paola Revenioti’s Correction, which was hosted at the Nicosia Municipal Arts Center in 2015,5 are two cases of subcultural artistic and curatorial work that were picked up by formal institutions, gaining access to the mainstream. The relationship of subcultures to the mainstream is a hot issue. Some argue that by virtue of being non-normative social groups positioned within a hegemonic culture, subcultures lose their power of resistance once they are assimilated in mainstream culture. Others see the crossing over as an act of “selling out.” In regard to queer subcultures in particular, entering the mainstream may be a “cause for both celebration and concern”6 as queer artists may receive recognition from the dominant culture

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with the potential of shaking certain of its conventions (they may even receive muchneeded financial assistance7) but they may get absorbed into mainstream culture in “voyeuristic and predatory” ways.8 For instance, today proclamations of sympathy for the LGBTQ community worldwide have shown the potential of turning into “a rallying cry for fairly conservative social projects aimed at assimilating gays and lesbians into the mainstream of the life of the nation and the family.”9 This strategy has also been discerned in Cyprus. A case in point is certain Cypriot politicians’ presence at Pride in 2017, provoking strong negative reactions from a particular queer faction in attendance. The said faction, whose core consisted of a small but dynamic group of anarcho-queers, claimed and gained a visibly differentiated presence during Pride’s main event and expressed a different set of ideological and political priorities than those of the LGBTQ community leaders and these politicians. One of these was their defense against pinkwashing, in other words, the practice of insincerely assuming a gay-friendly position, which they viewed these politicians appropriating. The LGBTQ community leaders had invited politicians viewed by this faction as hardliners on the Cyprus Question and as sharing the same political platform with the far-right National Popular Front (ELAM) and the Church whose head, Archbishop Chrysostomos the Second, publicly condemned homosexuality as an aberration and suggested that it may be eradicated through proper church-run schooling.10 The faction viewed this invitation as hypocritical and opportunistic, sparking a sustained booing and whistling that aimed at muting these politicians’ speeches. Queer subcultures of course are by their very nature challengers of heteronormativity11 and of conventional understandings of belonging, resisting normative standards. However, they are equally concerned with the issue of recognition, as they most often seek equal rights and acknowledged value in a society that shuns what it deems “deviant.” Though entering the mainstream may be problematic for queer subcultures, mainstream recognition may in turn be redemptive. Subcultures may to various extents and at various historical moments be normalized in society and consequently have certain of their ideals recognized. While once for instance, bodybuilders were dismissed for being extreme, fit bodies have now become mainstream, acceptable, and desirable. Although the process of normalization does not absorb all traits of a given subculture, key values can be “extracted and generalized.”12 In fact, since the mainstream absorbs a number of subterranean values, the relationship between the mainstream and subcultures can be said to be not wholly antagonistic but a complex one and in flux. The boundary between subterranean and mainstream culture in the Greek-Cypriot queer arts scene in certain cases also blurs, complicating discussions about each of these scenes’ territorial scopes.

Queer Orientations While scholars have touched on gender,13 sexuality—and non-heteronormative sexuality in particular—is an issue, which has received little critical attention in terms of its curatorial treatment in Cyprus. The queer art scene itself is an emerging one.

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Discernible are individual and heterogeneous curatorial and artistic initiatives that have been claiming space and opportunities for gaining greater visibility only in the last few years. We are, therefore, witnessing a scene in formation, which explains the absence of relevant scholarly literature and which in turn makes the need to begin mapping it significant. Focusing on mapping the scene’s relation to space and to sexuality is not incidental. Assuming sexuality “as a category for analysis”14 allows the exploration of “orientation” in the word’s dual senses: sexual and spatial. Queer phenomenologist Sara Ahmed postulates that “If orientation is a matter of how we reside in space, then sexual orientation might also be a matter of residence; of how we inhabit spaces as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we inhabit spaces with.”15 Consequently, examining “orientation” in this manner can aid toward a better understanding of the “sexualization of space, as well as the spatiality of sexual desire.”16 How people behave in space is—according to Judith Halberstam—influenced by understandings of time. She theorizes that heteronormative time and space are constructs that greatly differ from queer time and space.17 Heteronormative time and space place on a pedestal and normalize reproduction, family, nationalism, tradition, maturity, responsibility, capitalism, longevity, futurity, inheritance, and safety. In contrast, queer time and space deviate from generational temporal and spatial logics disrupting their “normative narratives.”18 That is not to say that all heterosexual and all homosexual individuals perfectly stick to these opposed frameworks. Not all LGBTQ individuals may live their lives in the same radical way19 but also by the same token that many heterosexual individuals “especially in postmodernity, will and do opt to live outside of reproductive and familial time as well as on the edges of logics of labor and production.”20 Moreover, queer counterpublics involve “more people than can be identified, more spaces than can be mapped beyond a few reference points, modes of feeling that can be learned rather than experienced as a birthright.”21 Unlike heterosexual culture that views community as necessarily relating to heterosexual coupling, queer counterpublics are “unrealizable as community or identity.”22 Relationships in heterosexual culture are intertwined with “legislation, public opinion (e.g., mass media) and convention,” sustaining a “mechanical”23 community that from the start dictates modes of affection and roles to be performed and upheld by its members. In turn, within our capitalist era, these “‘mechanical’ relationships between people based around the exchange of money,”24 promote individualism as opposed to solidarity and collectivity. Queer counterpublics on the other hand are more heterogeneous, stand in opposition to the complete standardization of mass culture, and are defined by a more fluid and diffuse sociality based on affective bonds or liaisons.25 Queer counterpublics complexly challenge heteronormative forms of belonging necessarily related to “domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation.”26 Overall, they deviate from and call into question institutionalized sexuality. Queer studies of sexuality and space furthermore grant the chance to better attend to “the local, the nonmetropolitan […], and the situated.”27 Research on globalization may often homogenize space and superficially touch on the local but attending to the study of sexuality in tandem with space may highlight the minutiae of the politics of

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space, uncovering for instance issues such as “the contours of […] ‘metronormativity.’”28 Metronormativity, referring to a privileging of queers living in metropolitan areas like New York and London, stands in relation to a devaluing of queers living in small towns or rural areas as a “sad and lonely” condition.29 Nicosia is not a metropolis in the same sense as Berlin or San Francisco for queer life but it is nonetheless the island’s big city of cultural and political life. Nicosia is also the base of Accept-LGBT Cyprus, active since 2010. Studying the unique in-between position of Nicosia as a non/metropolis may complicate binary understandings of the local/global and urban/rural sexual logics and reveal instead their complex interactions and influences. Also, Nicosia takes up an in-between position in an altogether different sense geographically. Being divided with half of it under Turkish military occupation, Nicosia is a post/colonial city that directly affects bodies and the way these bodies take up and interact in space. That Cyprus has been constructed as an in-between space acquires special significance here. Cyprus is located at a geographical point perceived as the end of the West or the beginning of the East and where cultures meet and clash. In this perceived binary opposition between Orient and Occident, Cyprus constitutes an ambiguous territory. It has often been presented as a hybrid or as “Half-Oriental”30 with its modern post-Ottoman condition juxtaposed with its Greek Classical and European medieval past and heritage.31 This ambiguity in representations of Cyprus has also featured in descriptions of the country as “having been subjected to historical violations that turned it into a ‘hermaphrodite’.”32 Furthermore, “Cyprus forms a crossroad where ethnic, sexual, gender and race politics are complex, interwoven, and endlessly negotiated.”33 Despite its small size, Nicosia is far from a homogeneous city. It is historically—as well as contemporarily—a regional crossroads that comes across as a cultural hybrid. Various aspects of life and culture in the city resemble those of a cosmopolitan metropolis just as other aspects retain local characteristics. As such, it allows room for artistic, and other, experimentations that may not be canonical in cities of similar size elsewhere. How does one begin to map artistic experimentation in the complex geographic and social landscape of Nicosia? Since “Orientations are about how we begin; how we proceed from ‘here,’ which affects how what is ‘there’ appears, how it presents itself,”34 we take queerness, non/metropolitanism, and post/coloniality as our own starting points in order to examine Nicosia’s queer art dwellings that this subculture inhabits. Key questions that arise for us are: How do queer artists orientate themselves toward or away from heterosexual culture in Nicosia? Also, how do Nicosia’s complex post/ colonial and non/metropolitan characteristics each orientate queer artists, their work, and curatorial decisions? Our chapter considers cases of both informal and formal venues that have been appropriated by Nicosia’s queer art scene in the process of claiming access to specific or wider audiences. We explore instances where this subculture assembles but also meets the public—claiming its presence—by utilizing non-mainstream art spaces like Apotheke and The Space Next to Kala Kathoumena, non-art-related spaces like the Nicosia’s Municipal Market, but also established art institutions and museums like NiMAC and the Ethnological Museum. We consider these cases as signs of a small but active subculture that is creative and flexible in its appropriation of space in which

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to thrive. As a by-product of this adaptability, the showing of the artistic output of this subculture varies from guerilla-style street performances to clandestine pop-up exhibitions in informal galleries in the backstreets of Nicosia’s Old Town to major, curated, and well-attended exhibitions in established art centers and museums. This eclecticism, we propose, demonstrates an ability of the subculture to adapt in order to strategically render its artistic output visible. It also appears to be related to the spatial vitality and diversification of the city center. We treat the cases presented below as decipherable texts that allow a reading, an understanding, and archiving of current trends brought about by Nicosia’s queer art subculture. We also regard this artistic and curatorial production as a “seismograp[h] … to gain new insights into the interplay between the subversive and the ‘normal,’ and [to study] social and cultural change”35 in the developing city of Nicosia.

Mapping Nicosia’s Queer Art Subculture Case 1: Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio at Apotheke Apotheke, an artist-run space, is a small warehouse in a semi-abandoned backstreet of Old Nicosia that has hosted several pop-up style exhibitions, with alternative and daring content, attended by a small but faithful crowd made up mostly of artists and art theorists. In October 2009, the gallery exhibited a selection of photographic prints from the controversial Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio, which depicts the staging of Mapplethorpe’s own BDSM desires. According to the curatorial statement, the ten exhibition prints were “an assembly of self-portraits and black and white images of transgressive poses with sexual accessories such as whips, which—despite their careful composition—cannot deny their calculated social provocation” and the photographs achieved “their suspense via the contrast between their dense referencing, their polished, rather classicist language of light and form, and the obscenity of their content.”36 Non-reproductive par excellence, an example is a stylized image of the act of male masturbation. The black-and-white photograph shows one hand firmly holding an erect penis and the other palm up in front of it as if about to collect the soon to be ejaculated semen. There is tension between a beautifully rendered form and the realization that what is being looked at is the staged act of masturbation. Another photograph is a selfportrait that shows the back of a leather-clad Mapplethorpe, bending over, buttocks exposed with a long whip protruding from his anus. Mapplethorpe’s head is turned looking provocatively back at the viewer. X Portfolio famously caused intense reactions when it was included in a large retrospective traveling exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s work The Perfect Moment in 1988. The exhibition sparked national controversy and a congressional debate in the United States with the National Endowment for the Arts being accused of funding what was seen to be obscene art. The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC then canceled its scheduled showing of the exhibition, consequently sparking reactions and a wave of support with protesters projecting slides of Mapplethorpe’s photographs on the façade

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of the gallery. X Portfolio was also the basis for an obscenity prosecution against the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, which showed The Perfect Moment.37 In Nicosia, it went rather unnoticed. As Director of Apotheke Demetris Taliotis recalls, there were no negative reactions “apart maybe from some momentary shock and disgust of the visitors towards some of the images.”38 That the exhibition did not cause moral panic or attract police visits is significant. It also generally passed unnoticed in the local press. The fact that the exhibition was not the work of a local artist may have also contributed to the exhibition’s limited attendance. However, the exhibition may have also gone unnoticed precisely because of its alternative nature and by being hosted at this underground, relatively unknown space. At the time, Apotheke was a new entity in the Old Town, which itself was then still not “entertainment-central.” As Taliotis put it, Apotheke used to have its “opening parties in the middle of the then dimly lit street, under the radar.”39 Clandestine spaces in dimly lit streets have commonly been appropriated by emerging queer subcultures. Aaron Betsky outlines how “The first queer spaces of the modern era were the dark alleys, unlit corners, and hidden rooms that queers found in the city itself.”40 Betsky further explains that queers—in the practice of cruising— “nee[d] conditions that in and of themselves dissolve walls and other constraints.”41 By reviving an unused warehouse in the dark part of Old Nicosia where bustling city life essentially breaks down, Apotheke “frustrate[s] ‘normal’ use and detection.”42 By claiming coordinates off the beaten track that must be discovered by either hearsay or adventurous nomadic wandering within the Old City, Apotheke positions itself away from mainstream heteronormative culture’s scrutiny.

Case 2: Re Aphrodite’s At Maroudia’s at the Ethnological Museum At Maroudia’s, which was on show between July and December 2012 at the Ethnological Museum is the biggest intervention thus far of Re Aphrodite, an all-female Cypriot artist collective, formed in 2010 by Chrystalleni Loizidou and Evanthia Tselika. At Maroudia’s was part of the exhibition project Terra Mediterranea—In Crisis organized by NiMAC, one of the most prestigious contemporary arts venues in the country and it was placed under the auspices of the Cyprus Presidency of the Council of the EU. Nonetheless, the At Maroudia’s exhibition component—quite tellingly—was not shown at NiMAC but at the Ethnological Museum, the former mansion of Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios, a historical figure associated with male-centered nationalist narratives. The Ethnological Museum is also referred to as the Dragoman’s House since the official role of Hadjigeorgakis was that of interpreter. Hadjigeorgakis, a major intermediary of an Ottoman province at the turn of the nineteenth century, “was concurrently a successful merchant, a moneylender, an entrepreneur, a landowner, a tax collector, and a major political player.”43 He was therefore a prominent member of the Ottoman establishment in Cyprus. Through his wide spectrum of activities, he “developed a range of legal, quasi-legal, and illegal means to accumulate wealth.”44 One of his massive-scale speculative ventures though led to the collapse of the province’s economy in 1802 and sparked a series of popular revolts, one of which led to the

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storming and looting of his mansion. Hadjigeorgakis fled to safety in Istanbul where he eventually was tried and executed for corruption and destabilization of the province.45 The fact of his execution led to Hadjigeorgakis being cast as a symbol of Ottoman oppression and brutality against the Greeks of Cyprus within modern nationalist historiography and museology. From a powerful and corrupt member of the Ottoman establishment, he has been transformed into a national hero. Hadjigeorgakis’s inbetween status as a Christian but also Ottoman interpreter as well as his contradictory status as high-powered quasi-villain turned hero makes him and his abode especially interesting and charged subjects. Re Aphrodite chose to tackle the figure of Hadjigeorgakis in an unexpected manner by naming their exhibition after Hadjigeorgakis’s second wife. Making a clear statement from the onset that this was a project designed to raise questions about gender and power, Re Aphrodite “feminized” the space of the mansion, which stands today as a symbol of national orthodoxy. Re Aphrodite explain that they isolate “drag” from “dragoman” and use it as a metaphor through which to talk among other things about sexuality.46 They clarify that they use the term “as defined within queer studies” to challenge orthodoxies these be “national, cultural or sexual.”47 A lot of the work was informed by feminist sensitivities and their curatorial aim of producing a transformative narrative (in the drag sense) was achieved by “feminizing” a space associated with nationalism, patriarchy, and masculinity. The practice of drag, as Judith Butler has argued, destabilizes the “notion of an original or primary gender identity”48 and makes possible “performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality.”49 Accordingly, contributions of At Maroudia’s made clear references to sexuality and symbolic references to transformations of various kinds, challenging normative gender bound by a heterosexual logic. One such contribution was the performance by male belly dancer Stavros Stavrou Karayanni titled “Aphrodite: Courtesan of the Word” (Figure 7.1). Karayanni’s performance was a kinetic interpretation of “Invisible in Daylight,” a 2012 poem on the theme of translation by Cypriot poet Stephanos Stephanides. The performance combined poetry recitation, dance, and image projection. It attempted to re-introduce a cultural texture imagined to exist in Hadjigeorgakis’s space that is eastern, in the musical strains associated with the colonial Orient and in the acting of gestures evoking Cyprus’s Ottoman past—a past, which is presented as a “black hole” within official historiography, education, and museology. Karayanni’s belly dancing in “European” attire shook up the dichotomy between East and West. His changing of costumes during the performance from “European” to “Eastern” further alluded to the notion of Cyprus as a hybrid cultural space. The costume changes additionally drew attention to our daily performances effected by attire or in other words, our outward appearances characterized as drag. Karayanni is also an established cultural studies scholar and author of Dancing Fear and Desire: Race, Sexuality, and Imperial Politics in Middle Eastern Dance. His dual role as performer and scholar results in artistic interventions that are articulate as “texts” and statements about dance itself, but also sexuality and culture. Karayanni

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Figure 7.1  Stavros Stavrou Karayanni performing “Aphrodite: Courtesan of the Word” in At Maroudia’s. Image courtesy of Despo Pasia.

understands Cyprus as an in-between space and culture that do not fit into cultural binaries.50 Gesturing to perceptions of belly dance as a derided Turkish cultural practice which within Greek-Cypriot ethnicity was obscured and condemned to unspeakability, his performance at Hadjigeorgakis Mansion acted as a political statement that opposed binaries and called attention to both cultural and sexual orientation, making apparent that queerness “slide[s] between sexual orientation and other kinds of orientation.”51 Despite the exhibition’s bold stance on gender and sexuality, that it was shown at the said venue and that it was attended by a much wider audience than that of the usual avant-garde curatorial projects, it went without major public disagreement regarding its central themes. What is certain is that NiMAC was willing to adopt Re Aphrodite’s “text,”52 as the discourse of At Maroudia’s was in the spirit of curatorial choices made more generally by NiMAC during those years. However, we cannot be certain that either the Cyprus Presidency or the Department of Antiquities (responsible for the Ethnological Museum) knew exactly what they were signing up for: a collection of, by and large, subversive artworks interrogating monolithic national, cultural, and sexual categories. For this exhibition, Re Aphrodite abandoned their usual guerilla tactics in order to place At Maroudia’s into the heart of the arts and the museum scene with state endorsement. This conscious choice shows the collective’s impetus to subversively claim public presence. Re Aphrodite essentially directed itself from the “outside” queer art scene into the “inside.” In effect, the collective unsettled the perhaps social given

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of keeping queerness “outside” or in the periphery. Re-inhabiting space is after all a necessity for queers who are thrust in a world that limits their orientation.

Cases 3 and 4: Despina Michaelidou’s Urban Drag and Small Homelands at The Space Next to Kala Kathoumena [Ο Χώρος Δίπλα Στα Καλά Καθούμενα] Despina Michaelidou is a sociologist and activist-turned performance artist. She tackles genders, sexualities, bodies, desires, and oppressions through intersectional artistic, feminist, anarchist, anti-capitalist, and queer collective initiatives. Many of her performances involve undressing as a means of challenging normative ideas about beauty and what types of bodies can be exposed naked in public. Two of her performances thus far, Urban Drag and Small Homelands, have been constructed around a clearly declared queer narrative. The first was a video of a performance in the streets of Madrid in 2013, which was later projected in Nicosia. The video titled Urban Drag shows five people undressing and re-dressing while walking in Gran Via, a busy commercial avenue, and in Chueca, Madrid’s gay neighborhood (Figure 7.2). The video starts with a projection of renowned drag queen RuPaul’s quote: “We’re born naked, the rest is drag.” It then shows the performers, including Michaelidou, being transformed from male to female, female to male and in-between states while walking, undressing, and re-dressing challenging thus the public with non-normative bodies and identities by acting these out in the urban space, which is where, according to the curatorial statement, sexual identities are created and imposed.53 Moreover, the work reveals the instability of performed gender identity. The video was later—in October 2014—projected at The Space Next to Kala Kathoumena, which is a performance space in the heart of what can be described as the alternative

Figure 7.2  Still from Urban Drag, featuring Despina Michaelidou, 2014.

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hangout at Nicosia’s Phaneromeni neighborhood. The screening was part of a festival called “Genders and Power” organized by Syspirosi Atakton, an anarchist group with significant presence within the alternative scene of Nicosia. Michaelidou’s second queer performance Small Homelands involved her performing a script that challenged various binaries as an androgynous persona. Small Homelands was an act within a wider performance titled Small Hopes produced by Vocal Group 2014 of Veramand Studio Academy on text written by Christos Krasides (aka kappa MYSTA) and Michaelidou. It was first shown in Nicosia in June 2014 in a music venue called The Alternate [Εναλλάξ]. Michaelidou subsequently performed her act in the same festival on “Genders and Power” at Kala Kathoumena where Urban Drag was also projected. The text was delivered partly as poetry recitation and partly as song. It attacked binaries like fascists/traitors, gay/straight, Muslims/Christians, Cypriots/ foreigners, men/women, normal/abnormal, ethical/unethical. It also included the following forceful passage: “I am not just a woman/ I am also a man/ I am a woman and a man simultaneously/ and sometimes neither/ and sometimes both/ I am what I want to be/ I am like what I want to be.” Both projects are direct attacks on heteronormative culture, which favors reproduction and by implication categories and roles that are fixed and set in opposition to one another. Michaelidou’s performances instead suggest fluidity in roles, identities, and sexualities. The choice of venue to show such work is important. The Kala Kathoumena coffee shop, its backroom performing area, and the surrounding neighborhood make up an urban space where anarchist and antifascist activism meet with those of the small but quite vocal politically organized queer subculture of Nicosia of which Michaelidou is a prominent member. It is also where activism meets the arts, and interventions like Michaelidou’s are given exposure for their political value. The Phaneromeni Square area has been associated with alternative politics for about two decades now. Despite visible signs of regeneration, Phaneromeni is still the primary location where anti-capitalist street parties and anti-fascist protests are organized. It is a location whose nucleus is the Greek-Orthodox Church of Panagia Phaneromeni but where anarchist, feminist, anti-clerical, and counter-nationalist graffiti is most visible. This is where the walls encourage you to “Smash Patriarchy” and “Riot like a Grrl” (Figure 7.3). It is therefore a space that challenges heteronormative logic that normalizes capitalism, the family, tradition, and nationalism, directly from the inside of a center symbolic of Greek-Orthodox tradition, ideals, and history. Both content and the choice of locale set cases like Michaelidou’s apart and render them as highly political, bottom-up, and as “work[ing] on, within, and against”54 dominant ideology.

Case 5: Paola Revenioti’s Correction at the Nicosia Municipal Market and at NiMAC In November 2014 and as part of the Day of Remembrance commemorating transgender victims, Accept-LGBT Cyprus set up a photography exhibition by Paola Revenioti, a Greek transgender activist and artist—a legend in the Athenian underground scene. The organizers took the bold decision to place the exhibition’s raw photographs of

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Figure 7.3  Graffiti in the Phaneromeni Square area. Photo: Nicos Philippou.

young men—some with their genitalia exposed—within the public space of Nicosia’s Municipal Market. Revenioti’s photographs were unpretentious snapshots of an Athenian cruising underground scene presented in the form of a diary. As Christos Kyriakides—the curator of the exhibition—put it, the photographs document “slogans on walls and mundane Athenian sitting rooms [that] swirl with night lovers, young boys, random encounters and political protests.”55 In contrast with the reception of Mapplethorpe’s work, a day after the opening of Revenioti’s Correction (2014) and after a member of the public filed a complaint, the police brought down the exhibition and confiscated the works on the grounds of publicizing lewd content in a public space. This member of the public’s perception of public space—most likely coded as heterosexual, safe, and family-oriented—apparently was challenged. As Butler has argued, “under conditions of normative heterosexuality, policing gender is sometimes used as a way of securing heterosexuality.”56 However, an outcry against the police action ensued that was channeled through both traditional and social media involving individuals, organized groups, and even state officials. The Commissioner for Administration (Ombudsman) dismissed police action as unnecessary, disproportionate, and repressive. NiMAC then responded with a written statement condemning the censorship and calling for a dialogue on freedom of artistic expression. More substantially, NiMAC re-instated the exhibition in its own space in June 2015 and invited Revenioti in a public conversation with Zelia Gregoriou, a gender and sexuality scholar. Unavoidably, debates about mainstreaming or normalizing queer practices are evoked here. What began as an attempt to bring visual material from the trans

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underground to the wider public without the mediation of an arts institution gained legitimacy only when it was eventually shown in a proper art space and after being defended on the liberal premise of a universal right to free artistic expression. In turn, the controversy attracted a larger audience than originally anticipated at the NiMAC show. It also provided a public platform to Revenioti to talk about trans identity politics directly to this wider audience. And if the artist/activist runs the risk of being seen to be mainstreamed/normalized due to collaborating with an established institution, the institution itself also risks being seen as controversial and more edgy than its usual patronage may tolerate. Ultimately, the case of Revenioti’s Correction points to the risks and dangers of claiming public visibility especially without the backing of a formal institution. At the same time, NiMAC’s initiative can be seen as strategic at incorporating the underground into the mainstream. NiMAC also sent the political message that trans lives everywhere matter.

Where Are We Now? To recapitulate, Nicosia’s queer scene is historically closeted but is claiming more visibility and assemblage. Both the establishment of Accept-LGBT Cyprus and Pride are signs of a willingness of the subculture to declare a presence and to promote more favorable social and political agendas. This is mirrored in the arts. Our chapter is a first attempt to map the emergence of an art scene that is inclusive of queer sensibilities. Its artistic output as well as its social and political agendas is interwoven with narratives on gender and feminism, nationalism, and questions about cultural orientation. At Maroudia’s aptly illustrates this and as the case of Michaelidou shows, this emerging queer art scene in some instances shares common ground with anarchist and antifascist activism. This subculture also demonstrates an adaptability and an eclecticism in its use of space in its effort to gain much-desired visibility, to connect with others and challenge norms. While At Maroudia’s brought non-normative sexual practice and gender subversion to more mainstream audiences by showing at the Ethnological Museum, the choice to show X Portfolio in the little-known Apotheke strategically claimed a safe space in the Old City away from the general public to allow an intimate viewing of this controversial work. Showing Urban Drag and Small Homelands at The Space Next to Kala Kathoumena brought out the political aspects of queer life. The specific venue and the surrounding neighborhood—given its complex social, political, and cultural history as a religious and nationalist omphalos but also as an anti-regime, alternative hub—seem an ideal backdrop for these two raw and politically charged projects. Lastly, Correction shown first at the Nicosia Municipal Market and then at NiMAC illustrates drifting (or “off the straight line”) geographical orientation as the exhibition moved from a space without any association with the arts (and in an attempt to reach the wider public in an unmediated and direct way) to a highly reputable arts space. These cases challenge the dichotomies of subcultures and the mainstream showing that they are instead often in relation and complexly so. Certain exhibitions were shown

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deliberately away from the mainstream so as not to attract attention or to maintain intimacy. Other exhibitions prove that the subculture and the mainstream may not necessarily be as distinct from each other as one may think. Overall, these cases challenge simplistic understandings of this subculture’s relation to the mainstream. What is more, Nicosia’s queer art scene adopts a local/global approach. Though inhabiting a space simultaneously cosmopolitan and small—non/metropolitan as we choose to refer to it here—it produces artistic projects that may not be as radically explicit as certain queer projects abroad; nonetheless, it compellingly pushes boundaries and also provides opportunities for exploring the queer underground abroad through exhibitions of works by figures like Mapplethorpe and Revenioti. This emerging queer art scene “appropriat[es], subvert[s], mirror[s], and choreograph[s] the orders of everyday life in new and liberating ways.”57 It claims space for itself where there may be none, in order to affirm itself within culture and to survive.58 It also claims a place in and engages with conversations abroad. Michaelidou’s import of her performance in Spain makes this particularly clear. Furthermore, the current queer art subculture reflects urban changes in the Old City both in gaining higher visibility in a space that was previously not as frequently visited by “outsiders” and by crossing into mainstream culture. What we are seeing here is the crossing of boundaries in a politically charged city in the process of regeneration. The emphasis is on fluidity rather than on fixity of identity, spatial boundaries, and social categories. Postmodern geographers Edward William Soja and David Harvey have cautioned that the field of critical theory “has privileged time/history over space/geography with many different implications.”59 Discussions on postmodernism, for instance, by Marxist theorists such as Fredric Jameson and even Harvey himself have defended the notion that “time has become a perpetual present” and consequently “space has flattened out in the face of creeping globalization.”60 Inevitably, where time has been treated as a focal point, the significance of the local has been vastly diminished if not effaced completely. To attempt setting the boundaries of this subculture would be to do it a disservice in that its assembly is diffuse. Nonetheless, the time has come for mapping this assembly, in solidarity. As for the scene’s act of collecting and displaying things, creations, personal experiences, and people for their own sake,61 this may be deemed a paramount feature of contemporary queer art and queer space.

Notes 1 2 3

Gabrielle Metz, “Urban Regeneration Projects in Nicosia,” The European Urban Knowledge Network, December 22, 2011, http://www.eukn.eu/e-library/project/ bericht/detail/urban-regeneration-projects-in-nicosia. Examples are “THE SPACE” (1999–2001), “Anexitilon” (2002–8), and “Midget Factory” (2003–12), now defunct signaling the altered relationship between artists and their use of space. “NiMAC History,” Nicosia Municipal Arts Center, http://nimac.org.cy/nimac (accessed December 29, 2017).

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Our analysis focuses on spaces located south of the Green Line. Our decision to omit Turkish-Cypriot spaces is a conscious one. Although the urgency to trace the latter is of equal importance, we have chosen to address the artistic production of a subculture/counterpublic that we are familiar with and to which we have privileged access. Being academics and artists ourselves, producing academic and creative work that puts theory in practice and actively liaising with this subculture allows us a significant advantage. It is this personal investment and familiarity with GreekCypriot spaces, artists, and curators that provides us with the drive and special insight to begin the archival work (in Ann Cvetkovich’s sense) of this localized subculture. 5 This follows the exhibition’s forced closing down by police at the Nicosia Municipal Market in 2014. 6 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 156. 7 Ibid., 158. 8 Ibid., 157. 9 Ibid., 153–4. 10 Evie Andreou, ‘“Archbishop Insists the Church Loves Homosexuals, but Says They Have Gone Overboard,’” Cyprus Mail, November 2, 2016, http://cyprusmail.com/2016/11/02/archbishop-insists-church-loves-homosexuals-says-goneoverboard. 11 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 154. 12 Thomas Johannson, Jesper Andreasson, and Christer Mattsson, “From Subcultures to Common Culture: Bodybuilders, Skinheads, and the Normalization of the Marginal,” SAGE Open 7, no. 2, May 8, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244017706596, 8. 13 See for instance Despo Pasia, “Encounters Betwixt and Between: Contemporary Art Curatorial Performances and the Left in the Republic of Cyprus,” in The Politics of Culture in Turkey, Greece & Cyprus: Performing the Left Since the Sixties, ed. Leonidas Karakatsanis and Nikolaos Papadogiannis (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 122. 14 Ibid., 5. 15 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 1. 16 Ibid. 17 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 10. 18 Ibid., 152. 19 Ibid., 1. 20 Ibid., 10. 21 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” in Intimacy, ed. Lauren Berlant (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 322. 22 Ibid. 23 Ken Gelder, “Introduction: The Field of Subcultural Studies,” in The Subcultures Reader, ed. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 6. 24 Ibid. 25 For a discussion on queer female intimacy, see Marilena Zackheos, “Amazon Island: Revisiting Female Intimacy in Luz María Umpierre-Herrera’s The Margarita Poems,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 37, no. 2 (2016): 27–47. 26 Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 322.

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27 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 12. 28 Ibid., 36. 29 Ibid. 30 Maynard Owen Williams, “Unspoiled Cyprus,” The National Geographic Magazine 54, no. 1 (July 1928): 1–55. See also Nicos Philippou, “The National Geographic and Half Oriental Cyprus,” in Photography and Cyprus: Time, Place and Identity, ed. Liz Wells, Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert, and Nicos Philippou (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 28–52. 31 John Thomson, Through Cyprus with the Camera in the Autumn of 1878 (London: Trigraph Limited, 1985), originally published in two volumes in 1879 by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington. See also Nicos Philippou, “Between East and West: John Thomson in Cyprus,” Cyprus Review 25, no. 1 (2013): 111–31. 32 Yiannis Papadakis, “Aphrodite Delights,” Postcolonial Studies 9, no. 3 (2006): 241. 33 Stavros Stavrou Karayanni, “Moving Identity: Dance in the Negotiation of Sexuality and Ethnicity in Cyprus,” Postcolonial Studies 9, no. 3 (2006): 252. 34 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 8. 35 Johannson, Andreasson and Mattsson, “From Subcultures to Common Culture,” 8. 36 Demetris Taliotis, personal communication, March 13, 2017. 37 Alex Palmer, “When Art Fought the Law and the Art Won,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 2, 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-art-fought-lawand-art-won-180956810. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Aaron Betsky, Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1997), 141. 41 Ibid., 148. 42 Ibid. 43 Antonis Hadjikyriakou, “The Province Goes to the Center: The Case of Hadjiyorgakis Kornesios, Dragoman of Cyprus,” in Living in the Ottoman Realm: Sultans, Subjects, and Elites, ed. Christine Isom-Verhaaren and Kent F. Schull (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 242. 44 Ibid., 243. 45 See Hadjikyriakou (2016) for details. 46 Re Aphrodite, “At Maroudia’s,” in Terra Mediterranea—In Crisis Catalogue, ed. Yiannis Toumazis (Nicosia: The Nicosia Municipal Arts Center, Associated with the Pierides Foundation, 2012), 222. 47 Ibid. 48 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 174. 49 Ibid., 180. 50 Karayanni, “Moving identity,” 252. 51 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 172. 52 Three years later, NiMAC would boldly host Revenioti’s Correction (2015). 53 “Inspiration: Urban Drag,” Queer Art Lab, February 3, 2014, https://queerartlab. c—om/2014/02/03/inspiration-urban-drag. 54 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 12. 55 Maria Gregoriou, “Second Chance to Show and Shine,” Cyprus Mail Online, June 3, 2015, http://cyprus-mail.com/2015/06/03/second-chance-to-show-and-shine.

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56 Butler, Gender Trouble, xii. 57 Ibid., 26. 58 Ibid., 58–9. 59 Ibid., 11. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 65.

Part Three

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8

Tracing the Local: Sense of Place and Identity in the Cypriot Landscape Elena Parpa

Set in Cyprus during the 1963–4 interethnic conflict, Ivi Meleagrou’s Eastern Mediterranean (1969) tells the story of Margarita, an amateur painter on a journey of self-discovery. Questions over who she is entwine in the novel with questions over the island’s identity, its oscillation between East and West, Greeks and Turks, perpetrators and victims. To solve the insinuated dilemmas she confronts, she travels to places, where her interest in the visual aspects of landscapes transforms into a desire to enfold herself in the earth, to absorb its qualities, including those stories that shoot out of “each and every stone,” speaking to who she (and the island) is.1 No longer a view from a distance, landscape in Eastern Mediterranean acquires agency and becomes the speaking topos of identity.2 A literary and rhetorical term in the English language, topos (τόπος) in Greek retains its spatial resonance.3 It means place, an actual physical location experienced from within to define who we are. Etymologically, it links with topio (τοπίο), the Greek word for “landscape,” which in contradistinction with topos refers to a physical location experienced from the outside and associates with the pictorial and the aesthetic. As suggested, however, in Eastern Mediterranean, topio and topos interconnect in explorations of senses of identity. This chapter reflects on the reciprocity of these two notions in relation to past and current artistic practices in Cyprus that situate themselves in specific locales to draw from elements of culture and address the particularities of identity. A convoluted notion, “identity” has been theoretically dissected across disciplines and within a postcolonial framework of critique to stress its fluidity in celebration of mobility and cultural hybridity. As cultural studies scholar Nikos Papastergiadis observes in his inquiry into “the spatial aesthetics” of subjectivity, “the boundaries of an authentic cultural identity are no longer framed according to neat and exclusive territorial coordinates.”4 Instead, they are increasingly constructed in hybrid ways, on the push and pull between mobility and attachment, local sources and global exchange. The discussion that ensues attends to such observations by claiming a strong geographical referent, the area in the vicinity of Ayios Sozomenos—a now-deserted, once

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ethnically mixed, village—in the outskirts of Nicosia. The area is known for its diverse cultural heritage that encompasses architecture from the Ottoman period, Gothic and Byzantine churches, and the notable archaeological site of the ancient city of Idalion. Simultaneously present, however, are the traces of rampant urbanization, dereliction, and conflict. Beyond such observations, which hint to the disparate practices that have shaped the area, the geographic delineation of this chapter’s scope was decided upon after consideration of how Ayios Sozomenos’s landscape has also been “shaped” by artists responding to its topography. For example, the painter and educator Adamantios Diamantis (1900–94) visited the area in the 1950s with Greek poet and Nobel Laureate, George Seferis (1900–71). What follows reflects on perceptions of place and cultural identity performed by both painter and poet over the area’s landscape at the same time that it examines how their artistic and poetic negotiations converse with those by artists following their own paths across the same or different locations. These artists include Haris Epaminonda (b. 1980), Stelios Kallinikou (b. 1985), Angelos Makrides (b. 1949), artist group Neoterismoi Toumazou—Orestis Lazouras (b. 1994), Maria Toumazou (b. 1989), Marina Xenofontos (b. 1988)—and Mustafa Hulusi (b. 1971). Working across a variety of media, these artists offer different perspectives on the folds within landscape, culture, and identity. Departing from previous conceptions of landscape as the topos of a grounded self, they approach it as the topos of interweaving temporalities, accretions, and references.

Cultural Identity in Spatio-Temporal Remoteness Adamantios Diamantis met George Seferis during the latter’s visit to Cyprus in the fall of 1953. Their acquaintance was sealed into a friendship when the two embarked on an impromptu excursion in the outskirts of Nicosia to visit a number of villages in the vicinity of Ayios Sozomenos, which included Dali and Pera Chorio Nisou.5 Seferis brought along his photographic camera, and his tour was part of a series of trips he conducted to places of interest across Cyprus with different companions, including on occasion Diamantis. In a retrospective consideration of their outcome, the painter described their excursions in the Cypriot countryside as “anichneftikoi peripatoi” (investigative walks).6 Not aimless meanderings or instinctual wanderings, these outings were apprehended by the painter as journeys of detection. As it has been suggested, Seferis’s visits to Cyprus related to the general pursuit of the Generation of the ’30s—a group of Greek poets, writers, artists, and intellectuals—to define the locus of Ellinikotita (Greekness).7 This quest corresponded with the aspiration to articulate the modern while considering the local. At the intersection of the two and against the aesthetic principle of autonomy, the Generation of the ’30s developed what has been described as “the aesthetic of autochthony,” promoting the concept that culture is “of itself ” (auto) and “springs from the land” (chthon).8 They turned to what they perceived as clusters of authenticity (the architectural vernacular, the folk artifact, the natural landscape) and traveling was devised as a practice of exploration. Such developments coincided with the emergence of organized mass tourism in the Aegean, the new wave of excursionism, and the advances in photographic technology.9

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Seferis came to Cyprus three times between 1953 and 1955, while stationed as a diplomat in Beirut. In Diamantis’s accounts of their walks, we get a glimpse of him engrossed in an investigative fever, accumulating all sorts of information, at times talking to people, at others asking the painter for a drawing, or documenting with his camera objects and places of fascination. “[Seferis] collected every impression,” remembered Diamantis.10 These “impressions” were distilled into his 1955 collection of poems, To Cyprus That Anointed Me (later published under Logbook III). They were also registered in a considerable body of photographs, which revealed a world of peasants, children, and landscapes bereft of modern progress and dotted with archaeological ruins, orthodox churches, and old trees.11 Current elucidations on his photographic output consider that, although an avid photographer, Seferis understood photographs as mere reflections of the world in need of the poetic act to acquire meaning. “It is the language that is developed around the photograph that has priority over the image,” notices Eleni Papargyriou.12 Yet, as she is keen to stress, “photographic images have an ideological significance as they measure the importance of the real world in the eyes of the beholder.”13 While photography, then, within Seferis’s oeuvre is assigned a secondary role, it does acquire ideological import, especially when examined in relation to his choice of themes. As some of his critics highlight, instead of encapsulating the cultural diversity of Cyprus, Seferis’s photographs and poems concentrated on certain aspects of the local, ignoring traces of Turkish presence on the island.14 The poet’s “selectiveness […] should not surprise us,” argue those who come to his defense, since his interest was not to “explore the Cypriot identity but rather the Greek identity of Cyprus.”15 He recognized it as rooted in the island’s living tradition, which he related to physical space. In Details on Cyprus, the poem Seferis dedicated to Diamantis as inspired by their walk, we get an idea of the connection. As we read along the verses, we accumulate a sense of discovering a place outside of progress, where the past still exists in the present and rises, for this reason, as the topos of tradition’s manifestation. The poem is mainly set in the courtyard of the Gothic church of Saint Mamas in Dali, where a monk decorates a gourd in the manner of his ancestors, and objects—a door handle in the shape of an owl, a stone figure with arched eyebrows, an old wooden wheel—mediate the place’s tradition.16 In their majority, the elements mentioned in the poem were photographically documented, hinting at how the visual and the verbal converged in Seferis’s work to delineate—even if selectively—the island’s cultural identity. If such deliberations allude to the poet’s outlook, what of the painter? In his recollections of their outing that day, Diamantis rises as an active agent examining the locus and components of the island’s cultural identity.17 Interestingly, photography had a place in the process. In their twenty-year-long correspondence, Diamantis sent Seferis pictures of the island’s material culture.18 We get a sense of what they depicted in his letters but also in his own 1974 take on Details on Cyprus, in which he makes use of images to penetrate Seferis’s thought.19 He included illustrations of people, artifacts, vernacular architectural elements, Byzantine wall paintings, as well as landscapes with cypresses and olive trees. Relating as they did to Seferis’s verses, the pictures excluded all traces of modernization and cultural hybridity, attesting to the poet’s and painter’s

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shared interest in providing proof of the past’s survival into the present. As it has been observed, Diamantis’s acquaintance with Seferis came to affirm in him the importance of discovering in isolated worlds “to archaeo aesthema tou topou mou” (the ancient feeling of my country).20 The notion of the “ancient” is repeated time and again in the painter’s writings, assuming the significance of a filter of assessment.21 Most interestingly, in his 1974 commentary, the word comes up in his description of the landscape photograph with cypresses and olive trees, which is captioned simply yet resonantly to archaeo topio (the ancient landscape).22 Seen amongst the rest of the images, mostly of objects, the landscape acquires the significance of a topos that has survived intact since time immemorial to both nourish and offer spatial dimension to culture’s material manifestations. “Things and place” (ta pragmata kai o topos) elucidate Diamantis as if both entities should be understood as perennially locked in a tight embrace, feeding the substrata of who we are.23 Not all things or places, we presume, but only those that assert their distinction in temporal depth and spatial remoteness. To think of landscape as topos in Diamantis’s investigative walks is to consider the way the two notions may resonate conceptually in efforts to stake out the territory of identity. Supporting such a contention is the work in cultural geography and other fields that has brought into view the way landscapes have been used in order to construct (or deny) identity and cultural difference in attempts to offer historical continuity to the presence of a community.24 Conversely, place has been recognized as important in the project of negotiating cultural identity, since it “[provides] an anchor of shared experience between people and community over time.”25 The temporal depth of place is crucial in conceptions of topos in modern Greek as well. According to neoHellenic studies scholar Artemis Leontis, “topos in Greek marks a physical place of return, a site where the past makes its presence felt.”26 Landscape and place, therefore, do interconnect as they are both seen to facilitate arguments of identity’s temporal continuity. To be sure, when Diamantis describes them as “ancient,” he is assigning time-depth to the topos of the island’s perceived Greek cultural identity, and by extend to cultural identity itself. If the topos is ancient, so is the culture it conveys. Landscape and place, however, in Diamantis also intertwine with “things.” In his writings, they take the shape of folk artifacts as highly expressive of the culture of the people involved in their making.27 These objects are also valued based on assumptions of the links they forge between the past and the present. In his 1974 collection of photographs, a close-up of patterns etched on the neck of a gourd is juxtaposed with an image showing similar designs used to decorate a medieval clay pot, visually documenting the connections between products of different periods.28 Just as landscape and place, then, are seen to testify to the temporal provenance of the island’s perceived Greek cultural identity, so does its tangible material heritage—its “things.” Such perceptions remind us of the view that cultural identity via its system of representations, including “its things,” carries overtones of essential unity and primordial oneness.29 In baiting the question of cultural identity in the 1990s, Stuart Hall recognizes that an important contention of cultural practices carried out within a colonial and diasporic framework was the “unearthing of that which the colonial experience buried and overlaid, bringing to light the hidden continuities of the

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past.”30 Hall’s argument is built on the idea that identity is not just “grounded in […] archaeology”; it also springs from an active re-telling of the past.31 In keeping with Hall’s postcolonial perspective, Homi Bhabha searched for the “location of culture” not in fixed places and timeframes but in the “in-between spaces” and the “disjunctive breaks of difference” as they articulate across time.32 Within the identity politics of colonial Cyprus, however, rootedness in time and place surfaced as principal objective. As demonstrated by relevant anthropological studies, the Greek Cypriots tried to prove their ethnic purity as Greeks by establishing strong historical links between the present and the island’s ancient Greek heritage. Such practices paralleled the assumption that land—in this case an island of Greek ancestry—and people shared a common substance—that of the spirit or the soul.33 In contradistinction, the Turkish Cypriots sought to counter their neighbors’ assertions by emphasizing heterogeneity, while evoking metaphors of blood in stressing their claims over the land.34 These negotiations over the location and temporal provenance of identity occurred within the rise of Greek and Turkish nationalisms, and against the British colonial regime and its attempts to forge an “essential” Cypriot identity of a mélange culture. The temporal provenance of identity was also asserted through the island’s experience of modernity, affirming the argument that cultural identity in the past was seen as incompatible with the imperative to be modern.35 For example, as early as 1934, Costas Proussis, teacher and literary critic, wrote a series of articles, which constituted a celebratory rejection of what he saw as the Cypriots’ uncritical embrace of modernity and by implication British Colonial rule.36 Instead his texts revered village life, the folk artifact, and the natural landscape, among other sources of cultural identity, as the locus of what was described as Kypriotismos (Cypriotisme). This endeavor to locate the island’s cultural identity, contra the modern, in the past and in the remote world of villages finds its roots in Diamantis’s early works such as Phyteftries [Planters] (1932–3), completed around the same time as Proussis’s reflections, and culminates in his monumental painting O kosmos tis Kyprou [The World of Cyprus] (1967–72). It can also be traced in his framing of landscapes and things as “ancient” in 1953, where signs of everyday life and possible traces of urbanization or cultural hybridity were excluded. As Diamantis settled his gaze over the villages in the vicinity of Ayios Sozomenos, topio became the topos of identity, envisioned as fixed in time and rooted in place to be extrapolated from closed traditions. What do such imaginings say about the web formed by land, place, and identity? And most importantly for the discussion that ensues, what kind of ante-history do they offer to the itineraries of Cypriot artists across the same locations in the present?

Topographies and Elastic Metaphor In his series of photographs titled Local Studies (2015–17), artist Stelios Kallinikou seeks to trace the “topography,” as it is stated, of Cypriot identity by journeying and photographing landscapes across the Cyprus divide.37 Topography is the graphē (writing) of a topos, elucidates Leontis, and the term’s use in relation to the artist’s

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work is indicative of how journeying the landscape intersects with ideas of delineating identity in relation to place.38 Just as in Diamantis’s case, then, landscape is approached as the topos of the self and traveling as the device to chart its territory. If indeed such ideas persist in current artistic practices, what is it that distinguishes Kallinikou’s studies in the present from Diamantis’s investigative walks in the past? Born south of the “Green Line” in the 1980s, Kallinikou belongs to a generation that grew up with second-hand recollections of places in what was colloquially referred to as the “other side.” When the checkpoints partly opened in 2003 and Cypriots crossed the border for the first time, the idea of “difference” was seen as manifested in the way each side grappled with urbanization and progress. Could there ever be, however, such a distinction as a Greek and Turkish Cypriot landscape? The issue of orientating oneself with respect to geographical (north/south), ethnic, or cultural coordinates (Greek/Turks, progressive/backward) is posed as a constant challenge in Kallinikou’s “topographies.” For instance, in Bricks (2015), a photograph that pictures a pile of bricks mounted on a palette, there is nothing to indicate our location apart from one negligible detail, visible only to the “trained” eye, which gives away our position as being north of the border. It is this and similar confusions that Kallinikou’s photographs emulate, an approach that distinguishes the work of other artists interested in disorganizing perceptions of otherness. Another example is Mustafa Hulusi and his series of black-and-white photographs of olive trees. The images are presented in identical pairs and contain no hints as to our whereabouts, apart from the information offered in the accompanying titles: A Cypriot Olive Tree Existing in Occupation in North Cyprus and A Cypriot Olive Tree Existing in Freedom in the United Cyprus Republic. The artist began work on the project in 2004, the year Cypriots voted on the “Anan Plan”—a constitutional arrangement brokered by the UN. Hope had spread in the days before the referendum amongst people across the island’s communities that a common future was conceivable. Cyprus could exist in freedom from one day to the next. It was this exciting possibility that Hulusi aspired his photographs to instill in us by focusing on olive trees, a traditional symbol of peace and an affirmative sign of coexistence in the landscape. This can also be detected in Kallinikou’s photographs and choice of locations, which include Ayios Sozomenos. Since Diamantis’s walk in the area, the village has been the site of violent clashes, which have inspired artists, such as Angelos Makrides (b. 1942), to look into its traumatic past. In a drawing dating from 1988, the artist depicts three elongated human figures protruding from buildings that turn into catapults setting the landscape ablaze. The only element left intact as a reminder of the village’s mixed heritage is the colourful kazantin (a mobile Cypriot traditional game popular among the island’s communities). Makrides’s drawing was executed in the aftermath of the Cyprus conflict and functions as a poetic reflection on the circumstances that led to the village’s current state. Situated next to the Green Line, Ayios Sozomenos lies deserted, comprising—along with other similarly abandoned sites—what has been evocatively described as the Cypriot “exotica.”39 If the island was revered in the past for its signs of “Greekness” or, in colonial times, for its assumed exotic character as a place between East and West, today its allure—or so the argument goes—is seen to lie in those marks that speak of its predicament as divided and scarred by conflict.

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Figure 8.1  Stelios Kallinikou, Ayios Sozomenos (from the series Local Studies), 2015, pigment print, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.

Instead of turning his attention to such signs of violence or sites of fascination, however, Kallinikou chooses to provide us with seemingly uninteresting, yet playful views of the area’s landscape. In one of his images, a flock of sheep takes center stage (Figure 8.1). Some animals are mating, others stare at the camera. It is a humorous diversion from the tangible scars of enmity, which could have taken place anywhere in Cyprus. It is whatever joint ground survived the damage we witness in Makrides’s drawing, which exists not in the abstract but as part of our daily lives. This focus on everydayness also serves to distinguish his studies from the investigative walks of the past. Topio and topos do converge in his work to chart the territory of identity, yet they do so over the surface of the banal and the everyday, where perceptions of “otherness” blur. This blurring co-exists in his work with an enlarged understanding of landscape’s meaning, most readily apprehended in those photographs where palm trees appear as leitmotif. A plant specific to the landscape in Cyprus since antiquity, the palm tree has been typically used in representations of the island to illustrate conceptions of geographical and cultural “otherness.” Indeed, in Kallinikou’s photographs the tree’s association with the categories of the “oriental” and the “exotic” can be recalled. In Pink House (2015), for example, palm trees are the “exotic” decorative element to match the equally exotic color (pink) that adorns the walls of a house. In Palm Trees (2016), a picture taken in Ayios Sozomenos, they form part of a view that brings to mind the typical orientalized sceneries of tourist postcards and the pastoral backdrops of biblical scenes (Figure 8.2). The photograph is of a dry plain, where a set of palm trees, barely

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surviving the scorching sun, appear on the horizon at the receding end of a web of crisscrossing marks, probably from car wheels. As well as their function as allusions to perspective’s transversals, these lines are also a reminder of the place’s proximity to one of Nicosia’s busiest industrial areas and, as such, of landscape’s actuality as the product of constant exploitation.40 We might be reminded, here, of Diamantis’s illustration, where the cultural demarcation of landscape as “ancient” excludes all reference to its reality, encouraging the consideration of natural elements, such as trees, as symbols of permanence. In Kallinikou’s photograph, however, we come to acknowledge—through the plain’s desolateness, the palms’ fragility and invocation of different associations (the exotic, the oriental, the biblical)—that landscape is not a cultural entity frozen in time but the sum of diverse practices, which change with time. To use the words of archaeologist Bjørnar Olsen, landscape is “a great patchwork of coexisting temporal horizons that create networks and connections between different times.”41 This idea of the “temporality of the landscape,” theoretically elaborated across disciplines, also converses with the nature of photography as a medium of mixed tenses.42 Roland Barthes reflects on this before a landscape photograph of Bethlehem, in which he observes the co-existence of three tenses: his present, the time of Jesus, and that of the photographer.43 In keeping with this reflection, we come to acknowledge that the (common) topos of identity that emerges in Kallinikou’s photographs is one of interweaving temporalities and cultural references, which become visible when we begin to pay attention not only to the details of daily life, but also to photography’s enlarged timespan.

Figure 8.2  Stelios Kallinikou, Palm Trees (from the series Local Studies), 2016, archival pigment print, dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist.

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In probing the question of cultural identity in the present, Papastergiadis argues that such conditions of conflation are optimal. He writes: “The energy of cultural identity, its potential for renewal […] are most potent and focused when there is a dual coding of past and present, foreign and familiar, known and unknown.”44 Building his argument within the theoretical framework of Hall and Bhabha, Papastergiadis revisits the terms of cultural identity in light of the changes observed due to globalization, migration and displacement, decolonization, and the internal critique of modernity. For the critic, the transformations occurring have generated an inversion in status. While in the past, cultural identity was consolidated in closed traditions, fixed places, and specific times, in the present moment of increased mobility it is distinguished by redrawing the boundaries of difference, celebrating diversity, and selectively incorporating the other on the intersections of global/local cultural exchanges in everyday interactions.45 As such, he understands cultural identity as “an elastic metaphor, one which stretches and embraces the ways in which we live” in order to exist in a “state of exquisite vibrancy” that allows the “old [to be] experienced within the contours of the new, and vice versa.”46 This broadening of the concept, which permits the mixing of the past with the present, the local with the global, the self with the other within the realm of the everyday, can be traced in the work of Neoterismoi Toumazou. The group takes its name from a shop owned by the grandfather of one of its members in the old part of the city of Nicosia, once a burgeoning center of small industries and commerce. In Greek, neoterismos signifies “the progressive” and “the new,” and in previous decades it was common on the signs of shops selling a wide range of goods. Responding to the shop’s past as such a place, the group converted it into an artist-run space at the same time that they redesigned and rebranded some of the shop’s old stock. To do so, they turned to the area’s struggling clothes and accessories manufacturers to revive methods of production becoming obsolete. There is an analogy to be drawn here with how artists in the past—as evidenced in the case of Diamantis—were attracted to products of threatened traditions to distil a sense of the local. In the case of Neoterismoi Toumazou, this quest to connect with aspects of their locality relates to those residues of modernity (traced on clothes, furniture, graphic design elements) which they perceive as exuding a Cypriot identity. It also combines with their extensive use of social media networks, with which they purposefully unsettle the boundaries of what they understand as “local.” Their Instagram account, for instance, serves as a platform to promote their activities and comment on their struggles as a young artist group working in the periphery of the art world, using found images and videos of child athletes. Most crucially, however, it exemplifies their willingness to simultaneously situate their practice across different communities—both placed and virtual—using a mixture of references and histories sourced from local and other contexts. An example of this is their installation titled A Land Rover Approached the Village (Black Rainbow) (2017), presented at the Nicosia Municipal Art Centre (NiMAC) (Figure 8.3).47 For this piece, the group partly reconstructed the ruins of the church of Saint Mamas in Ayios Sozomenos. Their decision related to observations on how the area’s dramatic desolateness serves as scenery for different communities to showcase their work and demonstrate their skills. These include amateurs using drones for aerial videos, bloggers reflecting on the place’s history, and bands experimenting

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Figure 8.3  Neoterismoi Toumazou, A Land Rover Approached the Village (Black Rainbow) [installation view], 2017, Nicosia Municipal Art Centre. Image courtesy of the artists.

with musical subcultures. In response, the group reconstructed the structure of Saint Mama’s church as a setting for their own activities as a group. Added, for example, to the installation’s design was a print from their photo-shoot to promote their first fashion collection. It was complemented by a sculpture inspired by the child gymnasts they follow on Instagram and made to resemble a human figure standing in “wheel pose.” The installation was completed with a wall-hanging sculpture cum charging station that took its shape from food drying racks used in villages—a fragmented graffiti spray-painted on one of the reconstructed walls and an abstract sign from LED and Plexiglas, meant as an amplification of a symbol that has no history or meaning. Walking in and around the installation, the experience transmitted was that of a heritage site reduced to its most iconic aspects in order to be rebranded with the use of self-referential marks, signs, and objects. If a past was ever emulated, it was that of the group’s own and of Ayios Sozomenos’s as a landscape, where identity is staged and performed. As for the place’s traumatic history, it is something to be considered but only out of context. The first part of the installation’s title was taken from a blog that recounted the history of the village’s evacuation. The blogger sourced the information from a newspaper article of the day, which reported how embroilment between Greek and Turkish Cypriots began in 1964 with a Land Rover approaching the village carrying a band of armed men. Wandering the installation, the impression created is

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that of the group purposefully borrowing the phrase as poetic trigger not of memory but of stories to be generated in the viewers’ imagination. Decontextualizing things and places is part of what Neoterismoi Toumazou do. In many respects, their installation was about claiming a historical site to incorporate it in their world, where references blend and transmute. At the same time, however, if considered within the frame of our discussion so far, their work is also telling of the continued relevance of searching for elements of identity and senses of belonging in the margins, be they old shops, neglected city areas, abandoned villages, or dramatic landscapes. Neoterismoi Toumazou’s choice to experiment with the site of Ayios Sozomenos may also be understood as indicative of their willingness to engage with their local context at the same time that they deliberately confuse its geographical and cultural boundaries by drawing from fields (fashion, technology, music) which situate them in communities with a global reach. Their installation, therefore, opens up the question of how sites such as Ayios Sozomenos are relevant, not because they represent the past or a specific culture, but because they offer an in-between space to experience cultural identity as an “elastic metaphor,” which stretches to embrace aspects of our way of life at the intersection of the old with the new, the past with the present, and the local with the global.48

To Conceive Things Otherwise: Landscape and the Politics of Exoticism If Kallinikou’s depiction of Ayios Sozomenos occurs within the project of envisioning the topography of the Cypriot identity within a dynamic interplay between references and time frames, which can also be evidenced in Neoterismoi Toumazou, Haris Epaminonda’s negotiation of the area’s landscape in her 16-mm film Chapters (2013) does allow questions of identity yet through powerful allusions to a geographically distant place outside of time.49 The film vaguely insinuates elements of a love story and is pieced together out of a series of tableaux vivants, which stage elements scourged from diverse cultures and time periods. Geishas and exotic animals, dervishes and men dancing capoeira, representations of Mount Fuji and the Taj Mahal co-exist with various objects, including masks and costumes, statues, and curiosities of every sort depicted against landscapes of waterfalls, palm trees, and desert earth (Figure 8.4). Contributing to the film’s overall mythical atmosphere are a series of long shots of a pyramid-like hill, which looms from afar like a mountain god. As the artist explained, the hill is located in the UN-controlled buffer zone near Athienou.50 Because of military regulations, it proved impossible to film it up-close, thus she settled on shooting it from Ayios Sozomenos, surrounded by a set of palm trees and bathed in a mysterious light.51 Unlike Kallinikou’s photographs or Neoterismoi Toumazou’s installation, Epaminonda’s frames leave out all reference to our location or to the possible origin of the objects depicted in the ensuing scenes. Things and landscapes interconnect, just as in Diamantis, yet in contradistinction with past conceptions of their relationship, their conjunction speaks of a profound diversity, baiting even the question of exoticism.

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Figure 8.4  Haris Epaminonda, Chapters (film-still), 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

In readings of Epaminonda’s installation series Volumes (2009–ongoing), the allusion to exoticism has been recognized “as an indirect reference to her own country, that has also been historically exoticized by being in the margins of the Western and the Eastern world.”52 However, if Cyprus’s exoticization functions as constant allusion to her own locale, it is also one that allows her to negotiate its cultural diversity. This approach, which seems at odds with the manipulative workings typically associated with exoticism, is one that brings to the fore a different strand of the concept’s history. We may think here of French ethnographer and archaeologist Victor Segalen, who sought to redeem exoticism by “[throwing] out all the abusive and rancid contents of the word.”53 From the Greek word exotikos, which literally translates into “that which comes from outside,” exoticism in its standard usage presupposed contact with the foreign and the spatially distant. For Segalen, the category’s linkage with geographical and cultural “otherness” leads to misrepresentations and generalizations.54 To escape such mishaps, he sought to envisage exoticism as a spatio-temporal category through the “aesthetic of the diverse,” in which the most critical contention was “the ability to conceive otherwise.”55 For Segalen, the exotic could be experienced everywhere, and the true exote was the person who recognizes diversity, even in the commonplace and the known. He wrote: “The exote, from the bottom of his patriarchal plot of land, summons up, desires, sniffs out elsewheres. But, living in these elsewheres—enclosing them, embracing them […]—the ancestral plot now becomes […] powerfully different. From this double game, this seesaw, a ceaseless, bottomless diversity.”56

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Segalen’s critical examination of exoticism offers a platform to reflect on aspects of the self/other relationship. It also highlights the ability to “sniff out elsewheres” in the familiar. Returning to Epaminonda’s Chapters, it is possible to argue in favor of a similar approach. When she films locations in and around the village of Ayios Sozomenos, she focuses on or introduces aspects that talk of an “otherwise” conception of the known. Although this negates the reality of the place, the bizarreness she constructs encourages the discovery of new possibilities in the familiar while enlarging our understanding of landscape to accommodate the conflation of places, cultures, and time periods. In the eyes of one critic, Epaminonda takes us into the depths of landscape to restore our connection with the notion of the “homeland” by giving it the shape of a “continent”—a place extended enough to shelter “heterogeneous wanderers.”57 This is effected as well by the way the artist uses the language of cinema. Her emphasis on the still frame and the tableau vivant highlights the intricate relationship between the filmic and the photographic, already addressed through terms of opposition in  the theoretical disentanglement of their distinction.58 As argued, however, the use of the still image in film by artists can “make relevant for film moments in the history of photography that speak to a particular relationship between the medium and the natural objects, when photography was used as a way to get closer to things and the world.”59 In Chapters, the emphasis on long takes slows down the film’s tempo to the extent that spectators are encouraged to delve into the visual examination of landscapes and objects. This is evidenced in the shots that pause on the shapes of stones, the texture of cracked earth, the color of the sky, alerting us to the landscape’s materiality. A similar approach is adopted in relation to objects in the film’s tableaux vivants, where artifacts fill the space of the screen to claim, just like the landscapes on view, an independent agency to drive the story of the film but also our conception of time and history. Recent considerations relating to the ontology of landscapes and things suggest a more nuanced understanding of how they influence human relations.60 While in the past, things and landscapes were understood as relics tied to time and place—we may turn, here, once again to Diamantis’s perception of things and places as “ancient”—we are now urged to consider them as existing in themselves. “Landscapes and things possess their own unique qualities […] that they bring to our cohabitation with them,” argues Olsen, who is also attracted to the idea that things “are not just traces or residues of absent presents; they are effectively engaged in assembling and hybridizing periods and epochs.”61 He thinks the same of landscapes, which he understands “as a network of interrelated times and time rhythms.”62 Returning to Chapters, it is this otherness of landscapes and things, but also their innate capacity to suggest the interweaving of temporalities, that Epaminonda seeks to convey through the conflation of the filmic with the photographic, which brings us back to the contention of “conceiving things otherwise.” Her static frames of long duration function as pointed meditations on their hybrid qualities that shape our perception of them and ourselves. In fact, through their other-worldly grandeur, we come to engage with a conception of identity that is “elastic” enough, if we are to return to Papastergiadis, to accommodate extraordinary combinations. By extent, through these unexpected mishmashes, the Cypriot landscape ceases to be a piece of land of a

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specific cultural identity of either Greek of Turkish heritage, but emerges as an entity of “a bottomless diversity.”

Conclusion In addressing the overlapping concepts of culture, identity, and landscape, this chapter concentrated on a region in the outskirts of Nicosia as a space of encounter between artists. In so doing, it has tried to underline the persistent interest, despite important shifts in perception, in staking out the topos of identity and culture as the two concepts connect across landscape to mutually shape each other. To highlight this enduring preoccupation is to acknowledge that the politics of cultural identity have yet to disappear. As Papastergiadis notes in a statement through which we can return to Meleagrou’s “speaking” topos: “To find a place to speak from but also one that speaks to and of you,” remains an important contention.63 As I have tried to exemplify, however, through the critical appraisal of artworks executed in different timeframes, socio-political conditions, and artistic media, what has changed is the interpretation of that which is spoken, a task undertaken by artists in Cyprus, who seek to problematize the place-identity nexus and address our new conditions of identity and belonging.

Notes Ivi Meleagrou, Eastern Mediterranean, trans. Andrew Hendry (Nicosia: Moufflon, 2015), 28. 2 For more on Meleagrou’s use of the trope of the “speaking topos,” see Vangelis Calotychos, “Sartrean Drive in Nicosia: Reproducing Personal and Public Affiliations in Ivi Meleagrou’s Eastern Mediterranean,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 8, no. 2 (1998): 328–49. 3 Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 18. 4 Nikos Papastergiadis, Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and the Everyday (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2010), 10. 5 Adamantios Diamantis, Leptomeries stin Kypro (Athens: Ermis, 1978), 17. 6 Diamantis, Leptomeries, 13. 7 Seferis’s visit to Cyprus has been variously assessed. A by-no-means exhaustive list of studies includes: Savvas Pavlou, Seferis kai Kypros (Nicosia: Cultural Services of the Ministry of Education and Culture, 2000); Michalis Pieris, “Seferis kai Kypros,” in Monternismos kai Ellinikotita, ed. Νasos Vagenas, Takis Kayialis, and Michalis Pieris (Crete: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 1997), 67–82; Yorgos Yorgis, O Seferis peri ton kata choran skaion (Athens: Smili, 1991). Ellinikotita (Greekness or “Hellenicity”) is a concept that involves the amalgamation of national identity and national consciousness, aesthetics, and history. See Dimitris Tziovas, O mythos tis genias tou ’30 (Athens: Polis, 2011), 293, 347–9. 8 Leontis, Topographies, 112–31. 9 Alexandra Moschovi, “This Is Greece: Visualizing Greekness in the Work of Nelly’s and Voula Papaioannou,” in Tourism Landscapes: Remaking Greece, ed. Yannis Aesopos (Athens: Domes Editions, 2014), 230. 1

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10 Michalis Pieris, Allilografia 1953–1971: Adamantios Diamantis and George Seferis (Athens: Stigmi, 1985), 22–3. Excerpt translated by the author. 11 For a selection of his photographs, see Emmanouel Kasdaglis, Kypros: Mnimi kai agapi me to fako tou Yorgou Seferi (Nicosia: Politistiko Kentro Laikis Trapezas, 1990). 12 Eleni Papargyriou, “Preliminary Remarks on George Seferis’ Visual Poetics,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 32, no. 1 (2008): 88. 13 Ibid., 82. 14 See Vangelis Calotychos, Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics (New York: Berg, 2003), 176. 15 Marinos Pourgouris, “Topographies of Greek Modernism,” in The Avant-Garde and the Margin, ed. Sajun Bahun-Radunovic and Marinos Pourgouris (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2006), 106–7. 16 George Seferis, “Details on Cyprus,” in George Seferis: Complete Poems, trans. Edmund Keely and Philip Sherrard (London: Anvil, 1995), 175. 17 Michalis Pieris, Correspondence 1953-1971: Adamantios Diamantis and Seferis (Athens: Stigmi, 1985), 20–3. 18 Ibid., 53, 56, 130, 162–3. 19 Diamantis’s text and accompanying images were compiled on the occasion of the 2nd Cyprological Congress in 1974. It was published in 1978. 20 Eleni Nikita, Adamantios Diamantis (Nicosia: Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, 1998), 68. 21 Pieris, Correspondence, 21. 22 Diamantis, Leptomeries, 21. 23 Pieris, Correspondence, 23. 24 For a relevant discussion, see David Lowenthal, “European and English Landscapes as National Symbols,” in Geography and National Identity, ed. David Hooson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 15–38; Mike Crang, “People, Landscapes and Time,” in Cultural Geography (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 14–26; W.J.T. Mitchell, “Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2000): 193–223. 25 Crang, “People, Landscapes and Time,” 102. 26 Leontis, Topographies, 19. 27 Pieris, Correspondence, 21, 23. 28 Diamantis, Leptomeries, 42–3. 29 Stuart Hall, “Interview with Roger Bromley,” in A Cultural Studies Reader: History, Theory, Practice, ed. Jessica Munns and Gita Rajan (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 659–73. 30 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 224. 31 Ibid. 32 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 33 Rebecca Bryant, Imagining the Modern (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 190. 34 Ibid., 207, 210. 35 Papastergiadis, Spatial Aesthetics, 46. 36 Costas Proussis, “H agnosti Kypros: Akomi ena kypriako ypomnima, na gnorisoume tone auto mas, ton topo mas, tin istoria tou,” Proini, July 1, 1934, 1. 37 Stellios Kallinikou, “Local Studies,” www.stelios-kallinikou.com/Local-studies-1 (accessed July 31, 2017). 38 Leontis, Topographies, 3.

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39 Haris Pellapaishotis, “The Art of the Buffer Zone,” in Photography and Cyprus: Time, Place and Identity, ed. Liz Wells et al. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 231. 40 I am referring to the Dali Industrial Area. 41 Bjørnar Olsen, In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (Lanham: Altamira, 2010), 108. 42 See, for example, Tim Ingold, “The Temporality of the Landscape,” World Archaeology 25, no. 2 (1993): 152–74. 43 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 1993), 97. 44 Papastergiadis, Spatial Aesthetics, 52. 45 Ibid., 61. 46 Ibid., 52, 61. 47 As part of the exhibition Terra Mediterranea: In Action (2017). 48 In recent years, Ayios Sozomenos has attracted the interest of architects and heritage scholars, who look into ways that such places of liminality and conflict may be preserved. See Ayios Sozomenos—Place of Barley: Timeless Encounters, a series of interventions and events within Ayios Sozomenos and the surrounding area organized in March 2018. 49 Epaminonda’s approach to usher us into a world, where people and places appear to exist out of time, was debated between anthropologist Yannis Papadakis and political scientist Costas Constantinou in a discussion organized in the context of her exhibition at the Point Centre of Contemporary Art in 2013. 50 From Epaminonda’s guided tour of her exhibition Chapters at Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia, October 12, 2013. 51 Ibid. 52 Elena Stylianou, “The Archive as a Space for Negotiating Identities: Defying ‘Cypriotness’ in the Work of Haris Epaminonda and Christodoulos Panayioutou,” in Photography and Cyprus: Time, Place and Identity, ed. Liz Wells et al. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 231. 53 Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 323–7. 54 Ibid. 55 For a relevant discussion, see Leland de la Durantaye, “Otherwise,” Cabinet 31 (Autumn 2008), http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/31/deladurantaye.php (accessed March 23, 2016). 56 Qtd. in Todorov, On Human Diversity, 330. 57 Glavkos Koumides, “H Kypros os ipeiros,” Phileleftheros, November 2013. 58 For a relevant discussion, see Louise Hornby, “Stillness and the Anticinematic in the Work of Fiona Tan,” Grey Room 41(Fall 2010): 48–71. 59 Hornby, “Stillness and the Anticinematic,” 54. 60 Such contemporary debates spring across disciplines. Some key texts include: Bruno Latour, “The Berlin Key or How to Do Words with Things,” in Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. Paul Graves-Brown (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 10–21; Daniel Miller, Materiality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). 61 Olsen, In Defense, 108. 62 Ibid., 107. 63 Papastergiadis, Spatial Aesthetics, 45.

9

The Ground Beneath Our Feet: A Discussion on Contemporary Art and Archaeology in Cyprus Participating Artists: Alev Adil, Haris Epaminonda, Maria Loizidou, and Christodoulos Panayiotou. Organized by Gabriel Koureas, Elena Parpa, and Christina Lambrou

The Ground beneath Our Feet, a project organized at the British Museum in September 20161 with the participation of artists Alev Adil, Haris Epaminonda, Maria Loizidou, and Christodoulos Panayiotou, was conceived with the intention of exploring the way archaeology crosses paths with artistic practice in Cyprus. The idea for such an inquiry emerged in 2014 in the context of a museum tour developed in collaboration with painter Polys Peslikas for the State Gallery of Contemporary Cypriot Art in Nicosia. Central to the tour’s itinerary was the head of a woman carved out of limestone to resemble a fragment of an ancient Greek statue. It belonged to Michael Kashalos (1885–1974), a shoemaker and self-taught artist who used to earn additional income by carving archaic-looking heads and selling them as genuine in the illicit antiquities trade.2 The suggested link between finding, making, living in Kashalos’s Head of a Woman (n.d.) interested us because of the questions it generates. For example, what does it mean when the history of art intersects with archaeology in an archaeologically important place such as Cyprus? Moreover, in what ways have artists engaged with the practices of this particular scientific field and the politics (or poetics) of what came out of the ground and from a distant past? These questions, which emerged from our meanderings in the state collection and beyond, opened up our inquiry to other equally prominent paths of study, focusing on the way artists today interrogate the meaning objects obtain as they move across time and space. Indeed, how do artists pursue an alternative negotiation of their materiality, what Alev Adil highlights in the discussion that ensues as “objectness”? Further to this, is their turn to archaeology concerned with injecting micro-histories into institutional narratives, thus probing into the speculative nature of historical accounts of the past? To address these questions and in keeping with the discursiveness of that initial discussion with artist Polys Peslikas, we extended an invitation to artists Alev Adil, Haris Epaminonda, Maria Loizidou, and Christodoulos Panayiotou to reflect on the

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way their practice references archaeology. This led to the conceptualization of The Ground beneath Our Feet as a set of talks with the intention of exploring the possible parallels, overlaps, and differences in the perspectives employed by each artist.3 That this exchange of approaches took place at the British Museum further stressed for us a key subtext in the discussion, alluding to Cyprus’s colonial past under the British archaeological spade. Room 72 of the British Museum, in which Cypriot antiquities are exhibited, is an example of the methods applied in retrieving, classifying, displaying, and interpreting that which was unearthed from places colonized in order to speak of their culture. It is an observation that is amplified and resounds in the museum vaults, a place where objects are stored away from public view. The archaeological practice of connecting with the past through the actual handling of objects is brought center stage, as is the idea that archaeology is as much about the rejected and the discarded as it is about the treasured and the collected; it is as much about fiction and intuitive insight as it is about truth and fact retrieval. This was one of the central issues discussed by the participating artists, as was the attention they pay to the development of alternative methods of constructing narratives and gaining knowledge not only from archaeological objects but also from the very concept of archaeology. For example, Haris Epaminonda works with found objects and images, usually timeworn and enigmatic. Retrieved by the artist from thrift stores and markets, these are cultural fragments taken out of context and out of time. In her

Figure 9.1  Haris Epaminonda, Installation view from  VOL. XXIII, Secession, Vienna, 2018. Courtesy of the artist, Rodeo London/Piraeus & Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia. Photo: Sophie Thun, Vienna.

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presentation, she spoke of the way she seeks to connect with them cognitively, but also through sensorial experiences, memory, and affect. Using images from her previous installations as visual stimuli, Epaminonda discussed her interest in archaeology as a metaphor that can move both vertically and horizontally, above and beneath the ground, to weave a narrative from a multitemporal perspective and out of at once lived

Figure 9.2  Haris Epaminonda, Untitled #02 b/h, 2015, framed paper collage, overall dimensions 52.5 × 42.8 × 2.5 cm. Private Collection, Malta.

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and imagined experiences. As witnessed in images from her ongoing series Volumes (2009–), the objects and images she amasses become part of carefully constructed spatial compositions, in which meaning is construed through association—between objects and support systems, objects and images, objects and architecture—blurring temporalities and cultural references. The bonds we weave with objects are also central to Maria Loizidou’s practice. In her presentation that focused, among other works, on two projects developed in archaeological spaces, the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia (Curating Body/The Cached Space, 2014–15) and Kerameikos in Athens (A Transfer, 2015), she spoke of how the conception of the fragment—archaeological or not—as a catalyst that initiates and connects diverse events, may lead to “a new map of the commons.”4 Re-inventing archaeological practices in a common space is crucial for Loizidou, as is their metaphoric consideration. For example, in her work Collective Autobiography (2015), the archaeological act of excavation and ordering of the collected specimens finds its equivalent in her excavations into the archives of her own artworks and their rearrangement into a re-modelled wooden closet. Art and archaeology, we are reminded here, are both practices that involve displaying that which was unearthed. Loizidou’s commitment, however, is to her working material, which often includes her own past and recollections. We were made aware of this in the introduction to her presentation, in which she recounted her childhood experiences with archaeological artifacts. Coming from Episkopi, an area of Cyprus rich with antiquities, Loizidou has vivid memories of farmers passing on to her father various findings they had come across while working in their fields. She would help her sister load them in the back of the

Figure 9.3  Maria Loizidou, A Transfer, NEON City Project 2015, Kerameikos Αrchaeological site and Museum, Athens, 2015. Image courtesy of NEON and the artist. Photo: Nikos Markou.

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family car to be transported to the Department of Antiquities in Nicosia. Let’s Get Lost (2001), a work she discusses in her talk, springs from her concern over matters of displacement, rootlessness, and precarious living. However, it may be understood as a representation of this memory, conceptualized as it was as a happening in which

Figure 9.4 Maria Loizidou, Curating Body/The Cached Space, Cyprus Museum, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Socratis Stratis.

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a truck overstuffed with figures made out of cloth crossed the city streets on the way to the gallery. Christodoulos Panayiotou has long been engaged with letter-writing. In his presentation, he read extracts from three letters describing how epistolography became a form of excavation—of memory and of the history of images and ideas. In one of his letters addressed to curator Magdalena Malm, he recounts how an incomplete painting by Carl Pilo (1711–93), which he understood as exemplary of the “careful balance between fact, experience, narration and history,” induced him to look into the visual culture of British colonial rule in Cyprus and the photographic archive of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition in particular.5 This gradually led him to “an excavation of an excavation,” as he recalled, which brought to light multiple unknown micro-histories. Meaning is layered, suggested Panayiotou, and so is time. In another one of his letters, we were placed in the present in front of a TV showing Disney’s Little Mermaid in a hotel in Trieste, where the archaeologist and art historian Johann Winckelmann (1717–68) was assassinated. In a skillfully weaved narrative, the artist invited us to think of mutilated legs, dismembered bodies, archaeological fragments, and differing approaches to preserving the past and its objects that range from Winckelmann’s ideas regarding perfect fragmentation to the Japanese technique of Kintsukuroi, whereby broken objects are mended with gold. For her talk, Alev Adil restaged her performance titled Offshore Dreaming; Aphrodite’s Gas Field (2015), in which the figure of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of

Figure 9.5  Christodoulos Panayiotou, Spoil Heap, 2015, ceramic tiles, dimensions variable, Installation view, Two Days after Forever, The Cyprus Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, 2015. Photo: Aurélien Mole / The Cyprus Pavilion. Courtesy of the artist and FNAC (National Foundation for Contemporary Art), France.

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Figure 9.6 Christodoulos Panayiotou,  74.51.2472 (Lifesize Bearded Votary in Egyptian Dress), 2015, Limestone sculpture, Installation view, Mármol Rosa, Casa Luis Barragán, 2017. Photo: Ramiro Chaves / Estancia FEMSA. Courtesy of the artist and kamel mennour, Paris / London.

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love said to have risen from the sea foam (aphros) off the coast of Cyprus, takes center stage to take the audience on a journey across time to consider her many guises—as the Phoenician goddess Astarte; as the Virgin Mary; and as the controversial gas field named in her honor, located off the southern coast of the island, where large energy and petrochemical companies are currently drilling the sea bed for valuable matter. For Adil, myths are the site of Cypriot identities and the sense we make of them determines our future, which poses the question of how to escape the past and current divisions that are expressed in the narratives we have devised to interpret them. Also important to Adil is how to do justice to the multiplicity, diversity, tolerance, and fluidity that exist in Cypriot mythologies. To answer this, she turns to Foucault’s archaeological approach to history with which she devises a methodology that is sensitive to “the layers, discontinuities, repetitions and differences, the physical and discursive traces left by the past which can be used both to understand and undermine the narrative sense, the stories which frame our understanding of the present.”6 In her talk, this thinking took the form of performative poetics, in which the artist’s evocative use of

Figure 9.7  Alev Adil, Becoming Afraditi, 2016, digital image. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 9.8  Alev Adil, Aphrodite to Mary, 2011, digital image. Image courtesy of the artist.

body and voice made the audience aware of their own bodily presence, encouraging a sensorial relationship to the past. At the event’s conclusion, we were left with the question of how to record and elaborate on the ideas that emerged over the course of the artists’ talks. What follows is the result of an exchange that occurred in May 2017 with some of the participating artists.7 Although the discussion unfolds in the logic of the fragment, this state of incompleteness works here in favor of maintaining a space for reflecting and exploring the parallels and overlaps that were revealed at the British Museum. Christina Lambrou: As archaeology is a reference in the work of all invited artists, it is also a paradigm in the way that one works and, in the way that one thinks about objects, materials, narratives, layers, and methods. Perhaps we could start this discussion thinking about the paradigm of archaeology as process, before moving on to the archaeological artifact. “An excavation of the excavation,” as Christodoulos Panayiotou put it in his presentation, the archaeological practice can also serve as lens or framework where, as Alev notes: “the physical and discursive traces of the past can be used both to

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Figure 9.9  Alev Adil, Drowned Genealogy, 2016, digital image. Image courtesy of the artist.

understand and undermine the stories that frame our understanding of the present.” Christodoulos and Alev had also demonstrated—in different ways—the importance of inserting one’s self into the narrative through narrating. This might provide a good starting point: how by adhering and straying from myths we can effectively open up narratives to a plasticity familiar to artistic practice. Christodoulos Panayiotou: Archaeology is a discipline with a long tradition of inventing and re-inventing itself. We can look at how archaeological arguments have been formed, reformed, negotiated, and changed through time. Elena Parpa: A result of this constant reconsideration of the discipline’s methods of engagement that you describe is the acknowledgment that the act of interpretation of the past does not solely involve scientific knowledge. It also asks for generous leaps of imagination. I find this oscillation between fact and fiction particularly interesting and relevant for artistic practice. Alev Adil: When you say “archaeology,” do you mean people in the practice of going with little spoons and brushes to dig the earth? Because I understand that it is, yes, a changing process, negotiating fact and fiction. What really interests me is the “archaeological turn” in philosophy, which has permanently changed our understanding of what archaeology is. C.P.: But archaeology as a practice of digging with spoons, as you say, is also a practice of interpreting and putting the findings in perspective.

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A.A.: Yes, of course. That process of interpretation, however, has been forever changed by the philosophical approach to archaeology. It has now become a profoundly philosophical practice—whether you do it with a spoon or not—following Foucault’s understanding of how knowledge and concepts are produced.8 So for me, what is interesting is to do archaeological thinking in art practice, rather than just discussing what literally happens to shards of pottery. E.P.: And what does archaeological thinking in art practice involve? A.A.: It’s about apprehending layers, not insisting on a continuity, and in relation to the question that you raised earlier, two key points become interesting: that the “archaeological” gives us an opportunity to think about a philosophy of objects—of object relations—and to think about mythology and narrative. Because, as you pointed out, narratives have driven the physical act of archaeology. But archaeology always disrupts narrative. It disrupts this smooth, teleological idea of how things progress. This is what fascinates me about the archaeological. C.P.: Alev, to return to your previous remark, taking the archaeological method as a filter to read Foucault’s work and philosophical method is fascinating. But I’m not sure if Foucault’s contribution to the concept of archaeology has changed the way we practice or the way we understand the discipline in general. I have the feeling that his thought cannot constitute the one and only apparatus of comprehension. A.A.: Clearly, but once you understand archaeology as a philosophical practice, the practice itself loses any innocence in the difference between thinking and doing. The point I’m making also speaks to your point about it being problematic to set neat categories between what is art and what is archaeology and how much archaeology is the creative and speculative and imaginative practice. It wasn’t a binary, antithetical position. It was actually building on what you were saying about the point of interaction between art and archaeology.

Embedded/Fragmented Narratives Haris Epaminonda: Archaeology as we know it is, and has been, a practice based largely on assumptions drawn out of existing and newly discovered findings. Things keep resurfacing over time. Different points in history are reinterpreted again and again, taking new routes. The notion of assumption is interesting in that it opens up the vast space of imagination. Really, how do we fill in the gaps? How do objects, each with their own embedded, fragmented narrative, and inherited characteristics, their relation to each other and to space, influence the way we read and interpret them? And how does, then, our own personal experience provide a space in which new meanings can emerge? A.A.: I totally relate to these questions, both in terms of object relations but also to this idea of the fragmented narrative. I am interested in your use of the term “inheritance.” What would an archaeology of the future be, I wonder? Because when you are practicing archaeology, you are projecting into the future. It is not just about the past; it is always the telling of something about the past for yourself to become

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something else. This question of inheritance, then, is very political. For example, why is Cyprus’s heritage in Room 72 of the British Museum, and who does Cyprus’s heritage belong to there? Adding to this, inheritance is about private property and I like this questioned. E.P.: I agree that the issue of heritage is crucial here both in terms of property but also in terms of it being a cultural process that involves acts of remembering in our attempt to make sense of the past, the present, and the future. And it is interesting to observe that these shifts in time occur in the fragmented narratives we construct around these objects we inherit. This makes me think of the centrality of objects in how we relate and explain the world. A.A.: Beyond the symbolism of the object and their hierarchy, narratives and myths, we should also talk of the material object-ness. When I look at this pair of earrings that someone wore, of course I fantasize about who the woman that wore them was, but the object-ness is also very seductive. The object is part of the symbolic order but is not reduced to it. C.P.: There is a linguistic distinction between inheritance and heritage in English, which does not exist in Greek. I have been thinking about this while listening to Alev and Haris and I’m wondering whether this is innocent—if anything can be innocent. Let us consider for a minute, some pearls that could have once been worn by an ancient queen or a slave, who knows? In our part of the world archaeological findings, such as those pearls, have been systematically used as a tangible proof or as illustration for collective narratives. Archaeology is central to the mythologies of our everyday lives and integral to the way they are constructed and narrated. Another thing that interests me is what Alev mentioned when speaking about “the archaeology of the future.” I have the feeling that every archaeological effort, every archaeological intention, functions as a kind of existential vanity projected to the future. An archaeology that organizes its arguments through a certain filtering of the past and projecting in the future. This strange concept of conservation of heritage is something that I never managed to understand or to feel at ease with. It makes imperative the responsibility to protect what we have from the past for future generations despite the fact that we do not know if they will be interested in it. So, it’s this projection toward a speculative past and a highly speculative future from which the present is distanced. C.L.: Haris mentioned before the idea of the embedded narrative in an object and I would really like to hear more of her thoughts on that. How can we understand an embedded narrative? H.E.: In fact, in my own practice, I collect found objects crafted anonymously from all over the world destined as useless objects of the past. I tend to assume or speculate an origin based on partial information available, if any, paired with what the specific attributes of the object might be. I am interested in such confrontations, in which the personal comes into play. This creates a sort of movement. It is there, in the space of imagination, that the object finds its place. When we are talking about objects and narration, we are not talking about fixed entities. The relationship between objects and the narratives attached to them is in constant flux. C.L.: Alev’s idea of Aphrodite as a shape-shifter might also come into play here.

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A.A.: The corpus of myth is so multifarious. A lot of this for me as an artist is an inhabiting of the pantheon of all those different Aphrodites. This idea of the sacred that comes through many different emotional states really speaks to me, as does the fact that the goddess of Love would be the mother of Fear and War. It speaks to me in a way that monotheistic ideas can’t. But since we are talking about embedded narrative, there is something about the fragment that is fascinating. I love Sappho’s poetry for instance. I hope I would love it as much if more of it survived. The preciousness of that shard … Something that remains after the flood, something we saved. To think about this object now, incomplete.

(In)complete Fragments A.A.: To go back to the topic of the narrative, I wanted to ask Christodoulos about letter-writing because the thing that was most fascinating is this trope of letter-writing as well as going to the archive. Letters make narratives but they also break narratives, like archaeology does. Writing is one of my practices and one of yours too. This writing archaeology, how to write archaeology? I was trying to do it with poetry but you are doing it with letter-writing. C.P.: I do write letters in general, which is again an archaeological tool to the extent of being obsolete as a form of expression. I don’t write letters in the concrete sense of communication which is also why I might be fetishizing—hopefully not—a certain literary tradition. I do not write letters with a pen and paper; I write them on my computer, I use Word, and I also do not put them in a stamped envelope and post them. I attach the letter to an email. I do write letters to actual people, but I think I write more for myself and the proof of that is that I have sent dozens of letters and never got a response back. Perhaps it’s a method of finding a language with a certain tradition of intimacy and the perversion of intending to be read by a wider audience; I’m thinking of figures like Madame de Sévigné, for example, who used the epistolary tradition in order to talk to the whole of Paris. C.L.: In the presentations at the British Museum, the idea of the “archaeological fragment” was touched upon in many instances, allowing us to think of this fragment both in its material form as object and in its participation in the construction of narratives. A fragment, which, stripped of its wholeness and of its functionality, becomes an “objet trouvé” of sorts. A fragmented object that surfaces from the ground while the ground is being ploughed, the story of this cultural fruit, in Cyprus (as elsewhere) appears to tell the story of archaeology as national produce. The fragment hidden beneath our feet acquires a new use, as its story of emergence from the ground becomes embedded in narratives of connection to a certain past. In a reverse analogy, the archaeological fragment opens up and becomes part of different contexts and new layers: there are many examples of ancient fragments used as construction materials in a new wall for example. These fragments whose function and meaning are continuously redefined through a positioning and juxtaposing above the ground are a practice that might reflect some of the ideas that Haris talked about.

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H.E.: I am attracted to stories that emerge. I am thinking of the importance of placement and composition of objects in the construction of such narratives and their environment. I like to imagine archaeology as a metaphor, as something that encompasses what is under, over, beneath, and above the ground, an axis that would move both vertically and horizontally. Our physical presence and understanding of our surrounding as well as that which is absent or invisible contribute greatly in acquiring knowledge about a certain object or place. E.P.: Your conception of archaeology as an extended metaphor that positions us both above and beneath the ground, in attempts to gain an understanding of the world through objects that are not only “read” but also felt, is very interesting because it necessarily asks that we think beyond the purely visible and tangible in acquiring knowledge. It is a prevalent contention in recent considerations within the discourse of archaeology as well; the idea that meaning can be worked out through other avenues, by paying attention to sensorial experiences, memory and affect. H.E.: I recently watched a film titled The Mourning Rock (2000) by the Greek director Filippos Koutsaftis. The film is set in Eleusina, now a heavily industrial town in west Attica in Greece, close to Athens. In ancient times, this place used to be a sacred place and the site of the Eleusinian Mysteries. The film itself is beautifully poetic and melancholic as it documents over the period of ten years the dramatic effects that the endless destruction has had on its people. The film also reveals the many efforts of the local community and archaeologists to stop this and protect their cultural heritage. Watching it, I was really touched by this figure, Panayiotis Farmakis, a homeless man with a powerful presence. He restlessly set himself the task to save discarded archaeological stones and artifacts thrown in the fields next to construction sites. When asked: “Where is your home?,” he answers: “I live above the ground and beneath the sky.” Though considered crazy by many, his wisdom appears beyond the spoken word. He understood, more than anyone, the ephemerality of his existence, and that these objects would outlive him, being the means for present and future generations to access the past and to ultimately connect to who we are. C.L.: There is also a kind of charm in this figure, and a big part of that charm is that he seems to be doing something that is unnecessary and futile. But it is extremely meaningful to him, as he walks around from one place to another collecting stones in his supermarket trolley. And maybe this man, this wanderer, is also a way to go back and bring into the discussion the gaps, the interstices, the in-betweens that somehow also become part of the fragment’s presence. Which brings to mind the fragmented and reassembled Japanese pottery whose cracks are mended with gold that Christodoulos brought up during the British Museum presentation. C.P.: The Japanese tradition of mending fragments—Kintsugi or Kintsukuroi— makes me think that there is a certain construction around the idea of the fragment in the West, which has not always been there. Ancient statues have been completed. Bernini, for example, completed the Barberini Faun. However, there was this idea that developed, this idea that won, which demands that fragments remain fragmented, incomplete. This is why the Faun has since been restored to its previous fragmented state. I think it is very much connected with our desire to preserve some sort of idea of

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originality. In certain Oriental traditions, there seems to be another perception. Take for example the Ise Grand Shrine in Japan and a series of other shrines as well, which are reconstructed from zero every twenty years. The original material might not be there anymore, but a certain knowledge of the construction of the object remains. A.A.: But also, the Parthenon has been reconstructed, Ephesos has been reconstructed, and now we have this movement saying that we should not have reconstructed them. And, yet, in terms of an archaeology of the future, every space we have now is so fakely constructed. C.P.: There is nothing more constructed than keeping the fragments of the Parthenon as they are. We know today that the Acropolis had a different appearance. It was colorful to the extent that when we see it in reconstructions, we are appalled. Keeping it white as it is has nothing to do with preserving it in its original state, but preserving a romantic idea of its invention.9 A.A.: The first time I went to the Parthenon I was really excited. I even had Freud’s A Disturbance of Memory in Athens with me. When I climbed to the top, there were all these people in high heeled shoes and I just refused to share the experience with them. I found a way to climb up that was really difficult. In subsequent visits, I didn’t even understand how I managed to do this. And I am only mentioning this to stress that we are not outside of this constructed perception of Acropolis as artists and as people.

Objects As Spaces of Imagination E.P.: I think your experience also opens up the question of how we value the past and according to what criteria, and what this might tell us about conserving (or destructing) cultural heritage. A.A.: Well, in the Republic of Cyprus, for example, there is a problematic approach to Ottoman heritage.10 People don’t actually acknowledge it, so they knock things down and turn them into car parks. But criteria concerning preservation can also be very personal. For example, I discover an unexpected object in my pocket, a cinema ticket from three years ago, and I need to keep it because it is a reminder of that time but a fragile one, which needs to be preserved. Yet, objects are both frail and strong. In fact, the object is more powerful than me. That ticket can actually never die, but I will. In different contexts, I think that really affects its value. C.P.: I often give this paradigm of Big Bird, one of the characters in Jim Henson’s The Muppet Show, singing at Henson’s funeral.11 I think for me watching that for the first time was a great realization of how our creations have the potential to outlive us. So, we try to define and organize these narratives and preserve objects and keep them close. I wonder if it is because of insecurity or fear, since we know that these objects will live much longer than us and might be reinterpreted or reinvented. A.A.: Returning to what you were saying about Japanese practice, I want to bring the idea of wabi-sabi in the discussion because that is very different. It relates to wanting things because they are used every day and show their age.12

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H.E.: Looking at objects from the past, having a past, a life of their own, is in itself quite beautiful. The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi and the practice of Kintsugi, which Christodoulos mentioned earlier, are both really interesting because they talk about fragility and possibility. When something is broken or damaged, it is not necessarily the end for this object. It can be, as well, a moment of transformation. And yet, the paradox to preserve objects according to our own desires prevails. But what happens, really, when the objects cease to exist? How do we deal with this loss? I am reminded, here, of a lecture Andrea Bruno13 gave in Nicosia in 2014. He talked about the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, two monumental sculptures carved into the cliff around the sixth century. In 2001, they had been blown up by the Taliban. The question for archaeologists and restorers was whether to reconstruct the two figures, or leave instead the two empty niches as a reminder of what had happened. Another fitting example, here, relates to the Berlin Wall. It is not the only place in the city in which a certain painful past relating to the German identity has been altered or erased. In 2009, I remember seeing the temporary erasure of the murals on the Berlin Wall made by artists from all over the world in 1990 after the reunification, now known as the East Side Gallery. The wall was restored and stabilized, painted over with white paint in order for these murals to be repainted again. All this obviously raised a lot of questions and created a controversy amongst the organizers and the artists, some of whom refused to repaint their images again. Wasn’t the erasure of these images jeopardizing the very concept that gave birth to them? Though most of the murals looked rather identical to the original, they were obviously looking new. This was a violent act, one that pointed to the power of gestures of erasure and how we can direct and redirect experience. An altered memory was shaped, and history was rewritten. C.P.: When it comes to the Berlin Wall, I always think of object sexuality, people who have an emotional or sexual desire for objects and even enter into relationships with them. There is this Swedish woman, for example, who married the Berlin Wall. She was known as the Frau Berliner Mauer and I remember reading an interview by her once, in which she discussed her reaction to the demolition of the Berlin Wall, a moment at once of joy for many, yet emotional destruction for her. This makes me think that objects, seemingly very stable, propose so many different potentials in how we may connect to them. C.L.: One of the magic things in this story is the way that objects are created by us and then they somehow become completely independent entities which we try to preserve. I think that there is something really important about the materiality of the object and the making of the object, and how this making detaches it from its creator and turns it into something that can be fetishized and placed in some sort of viewing or experiencing context like a museum, which one could argue provides a further fetishization of the object. A.A.: The interesting thing about the fetish is the added magic that the person brings to the object. Not to say that our practices are fetishistic but they are about magic as well. H.E.: I am thinking about how objects shape our desires as well. When Daniel and I started working on The Infinite Library14 project, we were reminded of a story that Mr Finkelstein, an academic historian from Denver, once told us regarding a nineteenthcentury physician. The physician kept referencing a book from his own library which

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Mr Finkelstein eventually decided to look for. He visited the library only to discover to his surprise that the physician never really read the whole book. Only the first few pages were cut open and read, the rest of the book remained untouched. Was he merely looking at the book as an object, imagining its potential? Finkelstein was caught in the dilemma, to either open the pages and read the book or place it back on the shelf exactly where he found it, entering the mind of the scientist, keeping the space of imagination intact. I find this story fascinating in relation to our practice of navigating into unknown territories, where we are dealing with more than just facts and historical proofs. A.A.: Absolutely, and this reminds me that in the Ashmolean Museum they have a fragment of Eteocypriot script, untranslated still. The magic in that for me is in the untranslated, the unexplained. H.E.: What I find beautiful in the practice of Kintsugi that Christodoulos brought up is that in relation to the uncertainty of the state of the world, it talks about possibility. Anything can happen, things can break and disappear but once we have the fragments, there is still a way to put them back together. This discussion was devised as a tool to unpick the various issues that emerged during the four artists’ presentations at the British Museum. Read in retrospect, it also functions to alert us to the dynamics that both define the conversation between art and archaeology and also unsettle the neat boundaries that distinguish each discipline. The conceptualization of archaeology as metaphor in artistic practice was one such idea that encourages a reconsideration of the distinction between the two disciplines, as was the call for an archaeological approach to the processes of both “thinking” and “making.” Other matters surfaced from the discussion, which included but were not limited to the poetic potential of the fragment; the narratives embedded in objects and the space these narratives open for the imagination to inhabit; the object-ness of things and the alternative paths to the scientific that this materiality creates in gaining knowledge. Other issues addressed related to the imperative to conserve the past, which also gives rise to the question of heritage and the discussion of the archaeological artifact as colonial inheritance and as tangible proof of contested ideas. These are urgent topics that remind us of Cyprus’s quandary as a place defined by colonial experiences and ethnic conflict. To expand on them in conjunction with art’s intertwining with archaeology remains an object for further research.

Notes 1

2

The event was organized by the Cyprus High Commission—Cultural Section and the British Museum under the auspices of the High Commissioner for the Republic of Cyprus. We would like to extend our gratitude to Achilleas Hadjikyriacou and to Dr. Thomas Kiely, curator of Cypriot antiquities at the museum. This was common practice amongst skilled craftsmen who simultaneously worked the land and the stone in the example of the ancient artifacts being unearthed from the soil of the fields they cultivated. See, for example, Adamantios Diamantis, The World of Cyprus: A Narrative (Nicosia: Ministry of Education and Culture, 2002), 55–7.

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Contemporary Art from Cyprus The title of the event was borrowed from Salman Rushdie’s 1999 novel The Ground beneath Her Feet (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999), in which the narrator’s father, an architect and a local historian known as the Digger of Bombay, devotes himself to digging the ground of his hometown in search of its “subterranean veracity” in contradistinction to his wife, a property developer who dreams of skyscrapers crowding Bombay’s horizon. In her vision of the city, her husband’s excavation sites, which speak of Bombay’s pre-colonial past, turn into glorious construction sites of postcolonial India. Rushdie’s insightful evocation of excavation as a process that could potentially lead to both subterranean depths and awe-inspiring heights, and correspondingly to the secrets of the past and the enigmas of the future carried for us an important ambivalence, pointing to the intricacies that arise when trying to find one’s ground in contexts of colonial encounter. Maria Loizidou, Reinventing Archaeological Practices towards Common Space (unpublished artist’s statement, 2016). From unpublished extracts of letters by Christodoulos Panayiotou. Alev Adil, Offshore Dreaming: Aphrodite’s Gas Field (unpublished artist’s statement, 2016). Maria Loizidou did not participate in the discussion due to scheduling issues. The artist here refers to Michel Foucault’s, The Archaeology of Knowledge (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1969), in which the French philosopher develops an analytical method of “digging” into systems of thought and knowledge. This is a notion that refers to a specific period in archaeology during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that demanded archaeological objects to be pristine white, which in turn is informed by ideas of aesthetics circulating during that period and especially Winkelmann’s writings on aesthetics. See Koureas’ essay in this volume. Jim Henson was the creator of The Muppet Show, in which Big Bird was a major puppet character. In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi involves the acceptance of imperfection and incompleteness. Andrea Bruno is an Italian architect and conservator who designed the “Museum of Nothing” in 1996 in Palaepaphos, now known as “The Museum of Maa-Palaiokastro.” The Infinite Library is an ongoing project developed by Epaminonda and artist Daniel Gustav Cramer. It involves an expanding archive of books, each created out of pages of one or more found books and bound anew. “The Infinite Library,” available at www.theinfinitelibrary.com/about.html.

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The Dig, the Fragment, and the Archive: The Archaeological Imaginary in Greek-Cypriot Contemporary Art Elena Stylianou and Artemis Eleftheriadou

In his seminal book The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language,1 Foucault used an archaeological approach to the past as a way of responding to the death of “origins” (arhés). He argued that archaeology does not search for beginnings or “relate any analysis to geological excavation,”2 but instead refers to the enunciative function of discourse: how discourse emerges and transforms as a “dissemination of gaps, voids, limitations, or disagreements.”3 Searching for a singular historic event (as origin) to explain the past or the present is no longer adequate; the past has to be seen as multi-layered and, as such, the task becomes to identify how an object, idea, or meaning is constructed out of discourse.4 Such analysis of discursive formation overlooks anything outside of discourse itself, as it “operates within it” and within “the general archive system to which [the discourse] belongs.”5 For Foucault, discursive practices include and are defined by dynamic systems of statements and sets of relations called “archives.”6 This chapter engages with this Foucaultian notion of transformation, rupture, historical discontinuity and multiplicity in the archaeological7 as well as the idea of the archive as a dynamic set of relations (rather than documents and/or objects). More specifically, the chapter investigates how these concepts relate to contemporary art in ways that could ultimately challenge institutional and discursive boundaries, in an effort to provide alternative readings or new interpretive approaches to the orthodox historical understanding and perception of time and narration. The chapter begins with a close historical investigation of the relationship between art and archaeology and continues to explore the work of three contemporary GreekCypriot artists who have adopted archaeology as a methodological approach.8 The works of Elizabeth Hoak-Doering, Socratis Socratous, and Savvas Christodoulides are brought into context, as they engage with current fluid notions of historicity, identity, and memory, offering alternative socio-political understandings of the present and an interpretive framework for looking at the past through objects.

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Each of these artists’ work adopts, to various degrees, three interrelated concepts of archaeology—excavation/unearthing, classification, and display—that disrupt the orthodox Greek-Cypriot archaeological imaginary. The artists offer new readings on conventional local aspirations that give testimony to the island’s hellenocentric past, to issues of identity, historical (dis)continuity, temporality, and materiality. Although these works reflect upon themes directly relevant to the local, they also contribute to the wider international debate about the construction of an archaeology of the present and to the Foucaultian inquiry of how the present is constructed in discourse as something fluid and incomplete.

Art and Archaeology: A Tense Relationship While the origins of the relationship between art and archaeology could theoretically be traced to the longstanding human desire to document, collect, archive, and interpret the past, the two practices have traditionally been perceived as incompatible. A long tradition of “heavy contextualization, justification and explicit explanation weigh[s] down most (perhaps all)” archaeological work, while innovation, fabrication, and mining other worlds for inspiration have been closely connected to the arts.9 While both disciplines have attempted to provide an interpretation of the past, their methodological approaches and connection to time and materiality have been perceived as radically divergent.10 This is based on enduring assumptions about the strict dichotomies between the objectivity and scientific rigor of the archaeological and the subjectivity, invention, and derision of the artistic,11 the latter of which is often derided as a “mock science.”12 Despite the fact that it has been mainly through archaeology that we have been able to see art from our past, attempts to collapse the disciplinary boundaries between the two have been met with challenges. Unable to assert objectivity, archaeology was also met with suspicion and was criticized for environmental determinism, a lack of human representation in its process, and its view of cultures as homeostatic. It was further criticized for excluding minority audiences and for failing to recognize issues of subjectivity and biases within its field. Enhanced by poststructuralist criticisms wary of any claims of truth and corroborated by technological advancements, archaeology adopted a new approach. A discipline traditionally devoted to silent monuments, traces, fragments, things of the past, and objects without context,13 archaeology developed a new addiction for “explanation and derivative interpretation.”14 This turn in approach also prepared the ground for many contemporary archaeologists to advocate for an art/archaeology scheme that moves “beyond the boundaries of archaeological practice and archaeological interpretation”15 and places the archaeological and the artistic in a closer and more meaningful dialogue abounding with collaborations and interchanges.16 The emergence of “hybrid experiments” between the two fields in the mid-twentieth century gave rise to “a wave of self-reflexive meta-archaeological publications re-examining and re-negotiating” processes of excavation and rewriting the past.17 Contemporary alliances between the two fields often involve artists who find value and artistic inspiration in examining the archaeological past, artists who

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use archaeological methods and tools in their creative process, or are invited by archaeologists to make work in situ, and also, less frequently, archaeologists who venture into gallery spaces and/or engage with artistic practice.18 Contemporary artists working with the archaeological often capitalize on looking back, and while this might derive from a modernist, quasi-romantic, and nostalgic view of a distant past and an attempt at reversing forgetfulness, there is also a crucial level of critique, retrospection, and investigation involved.19 In this case, artists often aim to unearth new perspectives or ones that have been silenced, through unpacking, disrupting, and deconstructing historical or official narratives, layers of meaning, as well as a personal account and processes of memorialization and witnessing. At times, artists turn to the past with a sense of humor, a critical attitude and an objective to propose new readings that are either fictional, fabricated and obscure, or simply alternative. For Cyprus, such critical approaches to historical continuity and processes of identity formation are of great significance, especially in relation to archaeology and the past. Archaeology in Cyprus has always served a political agenda and rarely experienced rivals in acts of history-weaving. The particular field of study developed in Cyprus during British colonial rule between 1878 and 1960: a period that witnessed the emergence of modern standards of excavation, documentation, and conservation of sites and monuments.20 This was also a time when various amateur excavations and expeditions, including the Swedish Cyprus Expedition of 1927, brought to light a wealth of artifacts that were then gifted to museums in the UK. These collections of a material past helped popularize Cypriot archaeology abroad, with British archaeologist Sir John Myres being considered the “father of Cypriot archaeology.”21 British colonialism’s tangible contributions to Cypriot archaeology should nevertheless be taken in the nineteenth century’s wider cultural and political framework, which witnessed a “Western” engagement with the classical past and the emergence of Hellenism as the dominant scholarly tradition within classical archaeology. Equally important, on the local level, these changes took place alongside the rise of nationalist sentiment among the Greek-Cypriot community, who sought union (enosis) with motherland Greece.22 In this context, archaeology was used as a means to an end, justifying the island’s ethnonational identity, while also serving a community’s need for a sense of belonging. In his book The Archaeology of Cyprus, Bernard Knapp claims that the tendency to understand the island’s character and socio-political development based solely on external factors, such as waves of migration, colonization, and invasion, which are all closely related to its geography,23 is limited and inadequate. As Knapp suggests, this partial approach to history and archaeology “tends to render the indigenous inhabitants mute and invisible, at a time when multivocality and a local (vs global) perspective invigorate and structure both historical and social scientific practice.”24 Thus, it is important to also examine those factors that shape a location’s politics, ideologies, and history from within and in relation to its material past. Michaël Jasmin argues that contemporary art can propose a new reading and a renewal of our experience of the landscape, the objects and their uses, “as well as the questions of intentionality of the people of the past who perceived, transformed and lived the landscape around them.”25 Michael Shanks describes this approach as a “positive moment of critique,” specifically, for creative practice to find ways

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through cultural production “to express different interests in the material past.”26 The connection between contemporary art, archaeology, materiality, and identity is at the heart of the analysis of the three Greek-Cypriot artists’ work presented here; it also facilitates a discussion about how art uses archaeology as a methodology to bring the past into the present.

Materialism and the Archaeological Imaginary In his essay The Artist as Historian, Mark Godfrey traced the emergence of artistic interest in historical research and representation to the late 1970s, with artists conducting research in archives or deploying archival forms of research.27 Godfrey argued that through these artworks, the viewer is invited to think about the past, to make connections between events, as well as reconsider the ways in which the past is represented. This inability, however, of the “historiographic turn” in contemporary art28 to account for the present, or to excavate the future, can—according to curator Dieter Roelstraete29—be compensated by the alignment of art and archaeology. In the encounter of the two disciplines, artists and archaeologists both engage in a process of truth production about “our bodily involvement in the world.”30 Art and archaeology share a profound understanding “of the primacy of the material in all culture” and are almost “‘naturally’ inclined to a Marxist epistemology”31 that supports the notion of material, economic forces as drivers of social and historical change. However, while the archaeologist is deeply committed to unearthing matter that will ultimately yield some truth about historical time, it is the archaeological imaginary in art that allows for a better understanding of our relation to matter without a “dandified detachment.”32 Incompatible with scientific validation and objective interpretation, the imaginary is an inevitable and necessary concession in archaeological practice. As Flora Vilches notes in her essay The Art of Archaeology, “despite the tangible aspects involved in the production of knowledge about the past, archaeologists still largely approach material matters intellectually.”33 Art, on the contrary, embraces the imaginary, fiction, and speculation and freely adopts allegory, irony, and metaphor. Relieved of any set of rigorous scientific methodologies, art is able to assimilate processes, imitate methods or appropriate findings without the fear of becoming dilettante. A new collision, identified in the literature as art/archaeology, refers to a move beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries to work “with the past in the present,”34 using artifacts and traces from the past as raw materials, allowing for the “creation of original work that has political intention and impact.”35 Understanding the critical potency of such an approach is particularly useful in discussing the work of Cypriot artists who work with and within the archaeological imaginary. These artists use archaeology as a methodological approach, offering a new vision of the island’s past in the present, an especially significant endeavor in a country whose identity is contested and in constant flux: from its convoluted histories of internal conflict and colonialism, to its lengthy experience of waves of migration from Central Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The island’s recent experience of the refugee crisis,

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along with the ongoing divide between its north and south has enhanced a sense of ambivalence around its identity, and renewed an interest in negotiating the idea of the border.

The Dig: Rescuing the Ephemeral Elizabeth Hoak-Doering, a US-born artist with extensive experience drawing for archaeologists, has been working in Cyprus over the past two decades, often adapting archaeological methods to her work. In 2010, she collected detailed images of ships that were carved onto the exposed frescoes of the French Gothic church of St. George of the Greeks located inside the Venetian walls of Famagusta (Figure 10.1). In her intimate process of recording, she “excavates” the anonymous graffiti-like traces on the Famagusta church through frottage: an artistic drawing process often used in archaeology and paleontology for the documentation of remains. Frottage has been used since the beginning of the twentieth century to challenge conventional ideas of authorship. As automatic writing (which Hoak-Doering also adopted in previous work),36 the technique of frottage involves notions of repetition, randomness, and uncertainty, which reframes art from being the result of a carefully planned process, to something that is incidental. Max Ernst used this technique on a variety of surfaces to produce a collection of drawings that were then published in 1926 as Histoire

Figure 10.1  Elizabeth Hoak-Doering, Three Ships from St. George of the Greeks, frottage, graphite on Nepali bark paper, 77 × 50 cm, Collection of The State Gallery of Contemporary Art of Cyprus (State Collection of the Republic of Cyprus).

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Naturelle (Natural History).37 Inspired by the poets Mallarmé and Rimbaud, as well as by Freud’s theories, Ernst thought of frottage as a meditative process of drawing on the subconscious.38 For Ernst, the process of rubbing was, contrary to earlier Dada experiments, less automatic and more methodical in breaking up and moving beyond conventional painting.39 In frottage, ideas of temporality and fleetingness are integral not only to the artist’s experience of rubbing but also to the nature of the technique. Writing takes time and the signs appear gradually, while the image itself is never final in the sense that “frottages achieve their genuine ambiguity as imprints and simultaneously as images that are constantly showing their ghostly emergence in a new way.”40 Hoak-Doering seems to acknowledge and capitalize on frottage’s potential to keep transforming, and although the carved marks on the Famagusta church are not those inflicted by nature or the passing of time like in Ernst’s initial experiments, she uses frottage in an effort to explore the mechanics of time. The marks are leftovers of human intervention: someone was here. Who, when, and why remain unknown. What is certain in these marks is the human desire to state a presence in time, to leave a mark, to persevere over finality. And because of their posthumous nature, these marks are a mediator between the past and the present. In tracing them, the artist participates in a meditative performance of re-enacted time. Repeating the movement of the drawing hand that originally carved the ships, suspends and collapses time in a singular moment of intimate encounter between the contemporary artist, the marked surface, and the anonymous historic actor. In effect, the nature of artistic performance, and the marks themselves, have a duration similar to that discussed by Henri Bergson in Matter and Memory.41 Bergson distinguishes memory and perception as opposites by saying that while matter, or the thing (object), is actual, “our perception of an object distinct from our body, separated from our body by an interval, never expresses anything but a virtual action.”42 What is a distant, imaginative past nevertheless becomes an actual experience of embodiment during which the past and the present coexist—what Deleuze described as “a psychologization.”43 Yiannis Hamilakis, in discussing the excavation of the Sanctuary of Poseidon on the island of Poros, examines the ability of architectural fragments to invoke memory and time. These fragments, he claims, are “multi-temporal, enacting and evoking different times simultaneously. They embody, materially and physically, memory as duration.”44 Similarly, in Hoak-Doering’s work, the rubbings of the carved ships are not of the present simply due to being visual traces of a relevant past, but also because they are integrated in an act of embodied performance: the act of tracing a trace. The frottage images of the carved ships served as raw material for Leaving the Harbor of Haloes (2010), a looped video animation. The ships—copies of the original carvings—perpetually sail left and right, detached from their status of permanence, evoking notions of transience, fluidity, and the ephemeral. The element of time-passing in the medium of video attests to the temporal experience and nature of frottage, while the changing images become a metaphor for the island’s changing character over time. The different ships floating casually on the gallery walls suggest the arrival and departure of numerous visitors on the island, who traveled from East and West, to

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conquer, influence, impact, and change the island’s history and cultural identity. The work becomes a testimony of an archaeology of migration in Cyprus and indirectly speaks of the ways in which movement, encounters, and social interaction have impacted the formation of individual and collective identity as one of constant becoming. The lack of clear boundaries, destinations, or horizons in the work complies with the conditions of movement, both historic and contemporary. Each ship is typical of a different time period and Hoak-Doering as an artist/archaeologist recognizes the historical importance of these marks as much as their triviality. In the context of conventional archaeological research, these traces are not useful as they say nothing about the past for which they might stand. However, the projected images, fleeting as they are, signify the fragility of historical narration and identity: both can be eternally reshaped and remain in flux.

The Display: Fabricating Classifications The fragility of borders, the re-visitation of contested histories, and the fluidity of identity are also recurrent themes in the work of Cyprus-born, Athens-based artist Socratis Socratous.45 Influenced by the turbulent and difficult histories of Greece, Cyprus, and the Middle East, Socratous approaches these issues through personal wonderings, “as a contemporary flâneur” through liminal spaces.46 With an allegorical intent, his work often alludes to and/or raises issues of migration and the crossing of physical and intellectual borders, which may often appear impermeable, yet essentially remain fabricated and fragile. Socratous produced a large-scale installation piece titled Casts of an Island over the course of his three-month residency in Cyprus in 2016, which was facilitated by the Point Centre of Contemporary Art (Figure 10.2). The work consisted of some 500 sculptures that were made out of a unique, unidentifiable material, meticulously arranged across the gallery floor. A result of extensive experimentation, aided by local foundry workers and metalsmiths, an unfamiliar material “light as plastic and fragile as glass”47 had been invented. Heated up to high temperatures, fine sand was cast and turned solid. The fragile sculptural forms, formalistic and industrial on the one hand, familiar and domestic on the other, were equally reminiscent of mechanical leftovers as they were of homely vessels and baskets. Their consistent fragility, color pigmentation, and production method resulted in seemingly hard and solid sand-like object assemblages that nevertheless easily break apart, evoking thus the delicate nature of the local state of affairs. The artist is also conversing with wider negotiations between global discourses and local materiality. He uses materials strictly of the Cypriot land, producing objects through collaboration with local craftsmen—raising further issues of craft versus art and artifact versus art—while maintaining an approach to form that could be from anywhere or nowhere. In this interchange between the local and the global, of difference yet intense similarity of size, shape, and morphology among the produced objects, distinctions about local identity become murkier than ever. One of the few wall-mounted sculptures features satellite footage of a sandstorm developing and covering the western, northern, and eastern borders of Asia, Africa,

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Figure 10.2  Socratis Socratous, Casts of an Island, 2015, dimensions variable. Installation view at Point Gallery of Contemporary Art. Image courtesy of the artist.

and Europe. Sandstorms, a natural yet violent phenomenon, spread dust and scatter materials in their path heedless of borders, while sand, loose, shapeless, and fragile defies form and permanence. As the sand spreads ominously and Cyprus becomes almost invisible under the murky ochre shades of the storm, both sand and storm become visual metaphors for the flow of people, cultures, and ideas, particularly relevant to the island. Cyprus, a geographical frontier between Europe, Asia, and Africa, has historically been a crossroad of civilizations, a stopover for travelers, and more recently a shelter to a wave of migrants coming from the Middle East. As such, Cyprus is both an amalgam of influences and a virtual archive of parallel trajectories, collective memories,48 and diverse narratives, while the question of its ethnic identity remains a timeless and crucial aporia giving rise, even today, to conflict and divisive political rhetoric. A heightened level of optimism prevailed regarding a long-awaited solution to the Cyprus Problem when Cyprus entered the European Union in 2004, but this did not come to pass; a physical and militarized zone continues to split the island into two.49 Moreover, in light of the EU’s current state of political, economic, and migration crisis and instability, debates around belonging have extended beyond the geopolitical sphere and entered the communal national and cultural structure of feeling that informs historic identity. Casts of an Island directly deals with this virtual archive of diverse identities, of their similarities and differences, as much as the artificiality of the notion of identity, by

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creating a frivolous display of fictitious objects, mimicking processes of classification. The man-made objects are arbitrarily taxonomized and classified by shape and size, blurring the lines of their separation, whereas borders and their edges are rendered practically invisible. The display is unorthodox: whereas the objects seem to follow strict codes of museological classification and have been carefully placed in an orderly fashion to resemble the typical archaeological assemblages of field data, they also break tradition with a subversive twist by being laid out on the floor. The artist’s decision to display the objects in this manner attests to the often arbitrary and subjective nature of classification. Classifications are common in archaeological practice; they aim to “to establish patterns to make comparison possible, that vary in degree of complexity.”50 In classifying artifacts—an extremely time-consuming and laborious process—the archaeologist is required to make decisions on morphology, method of making, period and area of origin, etc., regardless of how limited the information provided by the object/ fragment may be. Archaeological classifications can therefore be taken as arbitrary and subjective,51 and in the case of Cyprus, this has facilitated their service to hegemonic powers, greatly impacting collective memory, and proliferating and propagating a biased version of historic identity. Socratous’ classifications examine this exact subjectivity, informed by individual biases or ideological presumptions, to reverse it at its core as the objects on display are, at the same time, defined and undefined. The sculptures do not operate as singular gestures that seek “to establish patterns to make comparison possible.”52 Instead, acting as a whole, they work toward establishing a synergical operation that reveals the body of the Island. A body dispersed historically by signs of binary oppositions and, like so many other bodies (the body of the self, the social, the political, etc.), begins to discover and question the inner and outer boundaries that restrained it. Besides, continuous economic and cultural migrations reveal the ideological and divisive nature of rigid borders and definitions. Evading such rigidness calls for a more inclusive collective memory that belongs neither to Greece nor Turkey, the West nor the East, and knows no borders, like the sandstorm and its sand, constantly shifting and in flux, covering everyone on the island, all the same. This process of rejecting homogeneity in the formation of identity and history or understanding the past is in alignment with Foucault’s description of the archive, as one of lacking totality. The archive “emerges in fragments, regions and levels,” he posits, and the greater the chronological distance from it, the closer we can get to analyzing it.53 Foucault goes on to state that the archive can never be complete. An archive is inevitably deficient in its assemblage, as it depends on a number of unpredictable factors such as material deterioration, regional partiality, institutional compliancy, physical incapacity. It thus deprives us of our assumed continuities, speaks of historical discontinuity, and breaks “the thread of transcendental teleologies.”54 Socratous’ work is at the heart of this Foucaultian understanding of the archive. In displaying the sculptural objects, the artist adopts elements of documentation, classification, and taxonomy, echoing the institutional processes of archive formation. At the same time, his archive of objects is as much fictitious and poetic as it is arbitrary and subjective, attacking the core notion of the archive as a site of power and authority. Derrida

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affirms that the archive, deriving from the Greek arkhē, is not only politically charged but also powerful in shaping history, values, principles, and the law. In Archive Fever, Derrida claims that “there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory”55 and he proposes that it is only in democratic societies that the authoritative nature of the archive can be challenged. Hall Foster has described this drive as an archival impulse,56 which is scarcely new, especially in terms of artists actively appropriating images or adopting serial formats. “For Foster, it is the opportunity to discover and to re-make historical information, as much as the openness of an archive’s non-hierarchical spatiality, that inspires artists.”57 Here, Socratous’ work becomes a testimony to this potential of openness exposed through art. The archaeological imaginary, collective, and historic memories and the institutions that support them, once bound by hegemonic narratives, are here revisited to reveal the fragility of their locus. Art leads to fabrication, challenging the authoritative, and escaping any predetermined categories, fixed historical narratives of official documentation, and the monumental.

The Fragment: Appropriating the Everyday Appropriating monumentality in historical narration and archetypal categories in the archaeological imaginary is integral to artistic practice, especially in the act of assemblage, which suggests a performative act of “transformation, loss, or reinvention.”58 Its legacy lies in the ways in which it celebrates relations between heterogeneous materials and objects, and opens a new system “in which new relations between art and the everyday can be articulated.”59 In the work of Cyprus-born artist Savvas Christodoulides, fragments of objects are used in assemblages that form short stories that are open to interpretation. In his 2012 work Sleeping with the Hand Upright, and 2014 work Young Muslim Woman (Chanoumaki), purchased souvenirs alluding to classical antiquity, traditional utilitarian ready-mades, and other found objects are put together in paradoxical formations. In Sleeping with the Hand Upright (Figure 10.3), a mass-produced copy of the Ancient Greek bust of Apollo is positioned face-down on a marble base, which itself sits on a plywood box bearing the dimensions of a customized museum plinth. A traditional terracotta roof gutter is stuck on the back of the sculpture, seemingly pressing it down. Purposely hiding the face of the sculpture is a recurrent practice in Christodoulides’ oeuvre and also features in Young Muslim Woman (Figure 10.4). In the latter work, a copy of the head of Athena settles on a copy of a black figure vase, both of which are kept partially obscured by the application of a cheap nylon stocking that acts as a translucent veil. The objects in both works were purchased from souvenir shops and combined with a set of traditional, utilitarian Cypriot terracotta objects such as a flowerpot and a funnel to form vertical, invert-celebratory arrangements. Christodoulides uses objects the way language uses words to form sentences bearing content and context in an attempt to raise complex, and often ironic, comments challenging preconceived notions of value and accepted systems of authority. The objects stolen from their original context are paired to tell alternative narratives and

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Figure 10.3  Savvas Christodoulides, Sleeping with the Hand Upright, 2012, plaster, ceramic, wood, 173 × 100 × 80 cm. Image of the artist.

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Figure 10.4  Savvas Christodoulides, Young Muslim Woman (Chanoumaki), 2014, ceramic, socks, 135 × 37.5 × 37.5 cm. Image of the artist.

convey new meanings regarding historical and cultural identity, as well as of the everyday. Contrary to the heavily criticized appropriation practices implementing objects from marginalized cultures by Western artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the humorous and uncomplicated compositions of the assemblages attest here to a conscious state of critical intent. The practice of extensive misuse of

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appropriated cultural or even religious objects in art and popular culture occurring under the colonial gaze of the “primitive,” the “oriental,” or the “exotic” becomes in Chrystodoulides’ works an anecdote in an introspective look at the local. Ironically, he uses seemingly similar methods by employing touristic replicas and cultural objects cut off from their original context yet preserving a conscious awareness of their content and meaning. Making no effort toward aesthetic compliance and challenging traditional museological modes of display by mimicking, yet subverting the bases on which the sculptures are placed, the works attempt to question from within how these same hegemonic/political narratives have silenced or affected the local perception of identity. Appropriation practices of the late 1970s and late 1980s, which Douglas Crimp in his essay Pictures60 described as being mute and foreclosing historical narratives, in the case of Christodoulides’ assemblages come to “perform the unresolved.”61 As  in many examples of artistic appropriation, the archaeological finding or the cultural object offers infinite possibilities to re-visit and re-evaluate established historical narratives and hegemonic/colonial modes of power. Christodoulides’ works are a critique on the monumentality of the original ancient sculptures and the narratives they represent. In Cyprus, classical antiquity has often been used to affirm a direct connection to a Hellenic past, and replicas of such ancient ruins carry a nostalgic gaze toward a lost and glorious past for many GreekCypriots. The stereotypical image of Cyprus as a locus of Greek civilization and the site of abundant archaeological treasures that testify to this past is here humorously revisited through the awkward juxtapositions of the unalike sculptural elements. In these assemblages, the artist critically questions the use of history and archaeology in constructing Cypriotness and cultural history in a way that specifically excludes the diverse aspects of the island’s social landscape. Young Muslim Woman (Chanoumaki), the title for the covered head of Athena, is a bold statement about how the goddess’s identity is both masked and ambivalent. The work proposes that what was traditionally perceived with certainty and contributed toward a strong—albeit often problematic—historical and ideological conviction should perhaps be revised and re-interpreted. The covered head of Athena paired with the word chanoumaki from the Turkish word hanim, which means young woman, helps uncover the multiplicity in Cypriot ethnic identity and attests to the need of acknowledging how the history, and possibly the future, of the two communities is inextricably and intimately linked. The use of replica heads is equally significant: cheap souvenirs sold in tourist shops predominantly on the coastal areas of the island often feature as kitsch decorations in Cypriot homes. This artificiality reflects, on the one hand, the deep anxiousness felt by many Cypriots to affirm their Greek identity, and on the other, an excess of sentimentality that is here turned on its head.62 As products of modernity, tourism, the tourist, and the souvenir give insight to “one’s relationship to epistemological issues such as knowledge of the past […]; and one’s tacit employment of a methodology by which he or she builds an archive of personal history and gives himself or herself a sense of meaning.”63 In the case of the souvenir, many such replicas have been passed along generations as remains of a personal history, souvenirs of parents or grandparents, and family paraphernalia, without retaining much of their original sentimental or

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ideological value. However, as “fragments” of personal histories, as commodities and as souvenirs they still provide an image of a local relationship to identity. Beyond questioning a monumental past, a fixed-in-stone Greek identity, and an archaeology of the personal narrative, the kitsch replicas used in Christodoulides’ work also raise issues of commodity and the museum. The materials used are cheap and everyday, and the ready-made objects in both works are placed in compromising situations: either falling or being hidden from view, the face in both sculptural assemblages is forced to interact almost violently with mundane objects. Disrupting and disputing the auratic and prominent museum artifact—the ancient Greco-Roman sculpture—and its tradition, these paradoxical assemblages propose tangling the precious and the mundane. By doing so, the works respond to both art and archaeology, which in many cases, have inevitably mythologized the original and promoted the findings/works of the past as a heroic act, perpetually salvaging past endeavors in the context of the traditional museum. In a society where images and ideas are consumed at an accelerating speed and “commodity completes its colonization of social life,”64 both art and archaeology need to find ways to converse with the world and to engage audiences in alternative ways. Fiction and the imaginary might thus serve as solutions in redressing new considerations of the past in the present. Gustave Flaubert comments in his unfinished parody Bouvard and Pécuchet that without fiction, museum objects could not be sustained. He claims, “Should the fiction disappear, there is nothing left of the Museum but ‘bric-a-brac’, a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects which are incapable of substituting themselves either metonymically for the original objects or metaphorically for their representations.”65

The museum is central to the narrative in Flaubert’s essay and to the characters’ interest in questions of origin and history. As such, the museum is also intrinsically linked to the archaeological as the discipline concerned with arhès (origins) and to Foucault’s epistemology.66 Foucault’s use of the archaeological as a method of replacing the conventional unities of historicism with concepts of discontinuity, transformation, and rupture appears useful in approaching the confinement of the museum and its limitations. The idea of the archaeological object in Christodoulides’ work is no longer that of a dead body on display, offering a morose or heroic spectacle; it is resuscitated so that it can enter debates of the present. In that sense, history is never really dead, but rather continuously feeds the present, demanding of us—in the words of Derrida—to “learn to live with ghosts.”67Artists acquire the ability to engage with these “ghosts,” to converse with things of the past, to appropriate historical evidence, and ultimately to contribute toward political and social debates regarding the present. Appropriated objects, allegory, and the staging of these assemblages can be particularly seen as the epitome of disruption of continuity and conventional historical narration. It is in the act of disruption that the past can continue to exist in the present.68

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Conclusion: The Fabrication of Narratives In manifold forms of historical disturbance and dispute, the artists analyzed here engage with Cyprus’ contested histories and employ critical practices of contemporary art in order to dig the past and comment on the present. Foucault argued that history in its traditional form aimed to “memorize” the monuments of the past and to transform them into comprehensible documents. More specifically, history is meant to decipher the traces of human life, especially those that often remain silent or signify something other than what was initially intended. Foucault suggests that it is no longer archaeology that aspires to the conditions of history—to contextualize inert traces and silent monuments through historical discourse—quite the contrary: history aspires to the conditions of archaeology to monumentalize the past, to transform individual “documents into monuments.”69 A contemporary shift however toward challenging monumentality, totality, and the grand narratives of the archaeological imaginary has put both history and archaeology in an uncomfortable position. While in conventional historical analysis discontinuity and fragmentation were considered incongruous, Post-Foucaultian readings and understandings of historical knowledge are based on a proliferation of fluid boundaries, on discontinuities of events and temporalities, as well as on doubting totalities.70 This chapter has argued that art, as an agent of the fictitious, could exist in the intersections of document and monument, history and archaeology, time and image; it could amend and offer solutions, new readings, and new interpretive approaches to the orthodox historical choreography of time and narration.

Notes Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972; London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 2 Ibid., 131. 3 I. Jansen, “Discourse Analysis and Foucault’s ‘Archaeology of Knowledge’,” International Journal of Caring Sciences 1, no. 3 (2008): 109. 4 Jansen, “Discourse Analysis,” 140. 5 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 131. 6 Jansen, “Discourse Analysis.” 7 Ibid., 5. 8 This chapter is certainly not an overview of artists in Cyprus who work with archaeology as methodology. In fact, there are many artists who deal with similar issues, concepts, and methodological approaches such as Angelos Makrides, Maria Loizidou, Natalie Yiaxi, Peter Eramian, Haris Epaminonda, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Mariana Christofides, Kyriaki Costa, Alexandros Pissourios, Nicolas Lambouris—to name a few. See Chapter 9 of this book for further discussion on the relationship between archaeology and contemporary art in Cyprus. Moreover, the chapter is limited in the sense that it omits referencing the work of Turkish Cypriot artists dealing with similar issues. We expect that this is the beginning of a more expansive research. 1

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Doug Bailey, “Art/Archaeology: What Value Artistic-Archaeological Collaborations?” in Forum: Beyond Art/Archaeology, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 4, no. 2 (2017): 121–256. 10 Michael Jasmin, “Artists Connecting to Archaeologists: Encountering the Third Kind,” in Art and Archaeology: Collaborations, Conversations, Criticisms, ed. Ian Alden Russell and Andrew Cochrane (New York: Springer, 2014), 177. 11 Ibid. 12 Bailey, “Art/Archaeology: What Value Artistic-Archaeological Collaborations?” 13 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. 14 Doug Bailey, “Art//Archaeology//Art: Letting-Go Beyond,” in Art and Archaeology: Collaborations, Conversations, Criticisms, ed. Ian Alden Russell and Andrew Cochrane (New York: Springer, 2014), 231. 15 Doug Bailey, “Disarticulate-Repurpose-Disrupt: Art/Archaeology,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27, no. 4 (2017): 694. 16 Bailey, “Art/Archaeology: What Value Artistic-Archaeological Collaborations?.” 17 Vassilis Demou, The Present of the Past at a Time of No Future: A Synergistic Art Archeology of the Athenian Acropolis. Doctoral Thesis (University of Southampton, 2017), 3. 18 Bailey, “Art/Archaeology: What Value Artistic-Archaeological Collaborations?”; Bailey, “Disarticulate-Repurpose-Disrupt: Art/Archaeology”; Bailey, “Art// Archaeology//Art: Letting-Go Beyond.” 19 Dieter Roelstraete, “The Way of Shovel: On the Archaeological Imaginary in Art,” e-flux, no. 4 (2009), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/04/68582/the-way-of-theshovel-on-the-archeological-imaginary-in-art/ (accessed June 15, 2018). 20 Anja Ulbrich and Thomas Kiely, “Britain and the Archaeology of Cyprus. I. The Long 19th Century,” Cahiers du Centre d’Etudes Chypriotes 42 (2012): 305–56. 21 Ulbrich and Kiely, “Britain and the Archaeology of Cyprus.” 22 More details about the socio-political history of the island and the idea of enosis are provided in the introduction of this book. 23 Bernard A. Knapp, The Archaeology of Cyprus: From Earliest Prehistory through the Bronze Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1. 24 Ibid. 25 Jasmin, “Artists Connecting to Archaeologists,” 177. 26 Michael Shank, “Photography and Archaeology,” in The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representations in Archaeology, ed. Brian Leigh Molyneaux (New York: Routledge, 1997), 73–107. 27 Mark Godfrey, “The Artist as Historian,” October 120 (2007): 140–72. 28 Roelstraete, “The Way of Shovel”; also in the video “The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology,” https://vimeo.com/81746201 (accessed July 15, 2018). 29 Between November 2013 and March 2014, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presented the exhibition The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology. The exhibition, organized by curator Dieter Roelstraete, presented work—produced almost entirely after the year 2000—of several contemporary artists who share a common interest in history, archaeology, and archival research. More can be found online at https://mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2013/The-Way-Of-The-Shovel-Art-AsArchaeology (accessed October 12, 2017). 30 Roelstraete, “The Way of Shovel.” 31 Ibid., 5. 32 Ibid., 7.

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33 Flora Vilches, “The Art of Archaeology: Mark Dion and His Dig Projects,” Journal of Social Archaeology 7, no. 2 (2007): 202. 34 Bailey, “Art/Archaeology: What Value Artistic-Archaeological Collaborations?,” 252. 35 Bailey, “Disarticulate-Repurpose-Disrupt: Art/Archaeology,” 695. 36 In 2011, Elizabeth Hoak-Doering represented Cyprus at the Venice Biennale in a project titled Temporal Taxonomy that was curated by Yiannis Toumazis. She used kinetic installations where objects were triggered by visitors’ movement in the gallery, gradually producing drawings on paper. Notions of agency, temporality, automatic writing, and randomness were integral to the work. 37 Diane Waldman, “Max Ernst,” in Max Ernst: A Retrospective (New York: Solomon Guggenheim Museum, 1975), 15–61; also see Barbara Berger, Collage, Frottage, Grattage: Max Ernst’s Artistic Techniques (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 2008). https://www.modernamuseet.se/stockholm/en/exhibitions/max-ernst/collagefrottage-grattage/ (accessed July 28, 2018). 38 Waldman points out that Ernst reveals in his own writing that he was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting. In chapter CLXIII, da Vinci states: “By looking attentively at old and smeared walls, or stones and veined marble of various colours, you may fancy that you see in them several compositions, landscapes, battles, figures in quick motion, strange countenances, and dresses, with an infinity of other objects. By these confused lines the inventive genius is excited to new exertions.” Available online at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46915/46915h/46915-h.htm (accessed July 25, 2018). 39 Waldman, “Max Ernst.” 40 Ralph Ubl, Prehistoric Future: Max Ernst and the Return of Painting Between Wars, trans. Elizabeth Tucker (Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 72. 41 Ibid. 42 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York and London: Dover, 2004), 58. 43 Ibid.; Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberiam (New York: Zone Books, 1991). 44 Yiannis Hamilakis and Jo Labanyi, “Introduction: Time, Materiality, and the Work of Memory,” History & Memory 20, no. 4 (2008): 5. 45 Illegal Installation, 2005, Staffolini Gallery, Cyprus; Rumors, 2007, 53rd Venice Biennial, Cyprus Pavilion, Italy; Untitled, 2015, Centre Pompidou, France; Stolen Gardens, 2015, Museum of Cycladic Art, Greece. 46 Elena Parpa, “Socratis Socratous,” The Breeder, http://thebreedersystem.com/artists/ socratis-socratous-artist-page/ (accessed September 3, 2018). 47 Corsaro Michalangelo, Socratis Socratous: Casts of an Island [exhibition text] (Nicosia: Point Centre of Contemporary Art, 2016). 48 Michalangelo, Socratis Socratous: Casts of an Island. 49 For more on the Cyprus Problem, see the book’s Introduction. 50 Vilches, “The Art of Archaeology,” 205. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 202. 53 Michel Foucault, “The Historical a Priori and the Archive,” in The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Charles Merewether (1969; London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 29. 54 Foucault, “The Historical a Priori and the Archive,” 30. 55 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 10.

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56 Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Autumn 1996): 3–22. 57 Elena Stylianou, “The Archive as a Space for Negotiating Identities: Defying Cypriotness in the Work of Haris Epaminonda and Christodoulos Panayiotou,” in Photography and Cyprus: Time, Place and Identity, ed. L. Wells, T. Stylianou-Lambert, and N. Philippou (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), p. 242. 58 Anna Dezeuze, “Assemblage, Bricolage, and the Practice of Everyday Life,” Art Journal 67, no. 1 (2014): 32. 59 Ibid., 33. 60 Ibid. 61 Jan Verwoert, “Living with Ghosts: From Appropriation to Invocation in Contemporary Art,” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1, no. 2 (2007): 1–7. 62 Elena Stylianou and Nicos Philippou, “Miniature Landscape: Sharqi, the Instant Photograph and the Re-invention of Cyprus’ Image,” photographies 12, no. 1 (2019): 99–116. 63 Danielle Lasusa, “Eiffel Tower Key Chains and Other Pieces of Reality: The Philosophy of Souvenirs,” Philosophical Forum 38, no. 3 (2007): 272. 64 Guy Debort, The Society of the Spectacle (1967; New York: Zone Books, 1994), 42. 65 Flaubert Gustave, Bouvard and Pecuchet, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), in Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 52. 66 Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins. 67 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). 68 Bailey, “Disarticulate-Repurpose-Disrupt: Art/Archaeology”; Deleuze also discusses how we embody the past in the present and argues that one of the five ways in which this can be actualized is through “a kind of displacement by which the past is embodied only in terms of a present that is different from that which it has been” in Deleuze, Bergsonism, 71. 69 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 7. 70 Ibid.

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Transcultural Memory (Re)-Mediations in Cypriot Art History and Contemporary Art Gabriel Koureas

This chapter discusses contemporary visual artworks produced by Cypriot artists working in conversation with the Ottoman history of the island and Ottoman transcultural memories, those cultural and personal memories that travel across the different ethnic communities of the countries that formed part of the Ottoman Empire. Their transmedial work is characterized by the re-mediation of photography, the personal, and cultural customs to question current nationalist trends and conflicts not only in Cyprus but also in the Middle East more widely. Such artists, as Andreas Huyssen has stated, provide an alternative voice “at a time when we experience a delusional renationalization of politics in Europe and elsewhere” and their practices “can open up an alternative horizon.”1 The works of Cypriot artists Klitsa Antoniou, Katerina Attalidou, Lia Lapithi, and Özge Ertanin provide examples of “a non-identitarian way to be in the world”2 and their works offer a deeper understanding of the complex political and socio-cultural conditions in Cyprus. A transcultural memory approach provides as Astrid Erll argues a “moving away from site-bound and nation-bound” memory and involves instead an “interest in the mnemonic dynamics unfolding across and beyond boundaries.”3 This results, according to Erll, in questioning and challenging of Western perspectives on memory and a shift in focus to a conception of “memory in its multiplicity and discrepancy.”4 Memory studies in general has marginalized the case of the Ottoman Empire, and Cyprus in particular, leaving its rich history of transcultural exchanges among its ethnic communities largely unexplored.5 My aim is to bring these memories to the forefront of contemporary artistic debates thus revealing the rich transcultural mosaic formed by such exchanges. What also characterizes the works discussed here is the idea of assemblage both in the traditional art-historical sense and also in its Deleuzian conception. The former was coined by William Seitz for the 1961 Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibition, the “Art of Assemblage.” Seitz described assemblage as the “fastening together” of a variety of found and often very diverse materials.6 For the latter, Deleuze defines an assemblage as a “multiplicity that is made up of heterogeneous terms” and which “establishes liaisons and relations between them.”7 Seitz argued that the assembler, by

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juxtaposing material and associations, “mingles attraction and repulsion, natural and human identification, ironic and naïve responses,” thus creating “a constellation of meanings” that can exist independently of the materiality of the totality of the artwork in order to “produce centrifugal potentialities.”8 As Julia Kelly has argued “the anti-art function of found materials [carry] the potential to unravel the understanding of what art is for, becoming less an object of contemplation and poetic transfiguration than a tool for doing things.”9 The Deleuzian notion of assemblage serves in the case of Ottoman transcultural memories to address the heterogeneity of the ethnic communities that constituted the empire. The symbiosis of these communities has been discussed in relation to religious tolerance,10 co-existence,11 postcolonial studies, and orientalism.12 However, what these models have in common are a rigid structure, whether social or political, and a seamless totality. Instead, assemblage as Marcus and Saka argue can offer an alternative way of discussing the heterogeneous while preserving some concept of the structural. The time-space in which assemblage is imagined is both stable and unstable, and infused with movement and change, its “intent is to undermine such ideas of structure” by offering the possibility of expressing difference.13 As Anna Reading has argued, we can adopt a “memory assemblage” that is dynamic and involves transmedial, globalized, mobile connectivities, and mobilizations.14 Consequently, I engage with the conversations taking place between then and now, memory and contemporary art, and the symbiosis of Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities in Cyprus. The aim here is to create what I define as memory parallelotopia: spaces in the present that work in parallel with the past and which enable the dynamic exchange of cultural memories, in order to discuss the transformative politics of Ottoman cultural memories by separating, juxtaposing, and recombining the dimensions of these exchanges.

“The Dark Years”: Ottoman Transcultural Memories in Narratives of Famagusta In Greek Cypriot history, the four hundred years of Ottoman rule (1571–1878) are known as the “Dark Years.” This period has, since the independence of the island from British colonial rule in 1960, been used to construct the image of the “other” by the Greek Cypriot community in order to demonstrate the “barbarism” of the Ottoman rulers, and by extension the barbarism of modern Turkey and its occupation of part of the island since 1974. This same period has also provided instances of heroism and national pride though its many examples of resistance of the power of what is often described as the “ruthless ruler.” What is ignored in Greek Cypriot cultural memory is the transculturalism that characterized the Ottoman Empire. In what follows, I will attempt to highlight these absent and hidden memories, which have been veiled by nationalist narratives. I do this by bringing together art-historical writings and artistic production from the colonial and postcolonial history of Cyprus in order to address issues of veiling and unveiling transcultural memories. I will start by concentrating

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on the town of Famagusta, on the eastern coast of the island, part of which has been a “no man’s land” since 1974, and which is currently attracting attention because of a number of political and civil initiatives to reopen and redesign the town through the projects Hands on Famagusta and Famagusta Ecocity. Both projects attempt to re-imagine the town by incorporating the richness of the transcultural memory exchanges that characterized life in the city during its past history.15 The example of Famagusta provides the steppingstone from which Ottoman transcultural memory exchanges and remediation in contemporary artistic practice will be discussed. The work of the Greek Cypriot writer Agni Michailidi (1914–90) and her semiautobiographical work Το Παλιό Βαρώσι [The Old Varosi]16 (1970)17 will be juxtaposed with the artistic output of painter George Georghiou (1901–72) and the art-historical essay written by Eleni Nikita to accompany the 1999 exhibition in Nicosia and London organized by the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Cyprus and the A.G. Leventis Foundation.18 Both Michailidi and Georghiou were born and brought up during the British colonial period in the town of Famagusta. Their work reveals the complexities of the transcultural exchanges among the various ethnicities who lived in the town as well as the legacy of the Ottoman Empire. Michailidi’s introduction, titled “Apology,” places her writing within the realm of memory work as she informs the reader that this is a book not only about “memory,” “nostalgia,” and of “re-kindling blurred images” but also about “progress” and the impact of modernity.19 The book opens with the foundation of Varosi, and Michailidi informs us that with the conquest of the town by the Ottoman Turks in 1571, the Greek inhabitants of the walled town started to abandon it. Hence, from the outset, the biography of the town and its memories is one of conquest and abandonment. In the pages that follow, the Ottomans are erased from the biographical narrative. Even under the chapter titled “The Arrival of Foreigners,” the Ottoman Turks are completely absent. Instead, we are introduced to the arrival of the Armenians in 1915 following the events of the Armenian Genocide who are described as “hardworking,” the Greek refugees from Russia in 1919, and the Greek refugees from Asia Minor following the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1924. All these “peaceful invasions,” according to Michailidi, “had a great impact on the life of the city.”20 But what about the impact of the Ottoman Turks on Famagusta? Implicit in this absence of the Ottoman Turks from the narrative is, of course, the fact that they lived on the island for four centuries before the arrival of the new refugees. Indirect references to these absent/present inhabitants of the city are scattered throughout the narrative. In the chapter dedicated to the fairs that took place in the town and which were located in the street outside the walled city in what was mainly a Turkish neighborhood, we are introduced to the culinary delicacies that were on offer. These were, of course, part of Ottoman cuisine and were to be found throughout the Middle East. Special mention is given to koupes (mincemeat enclosed in a cracked wheat shell) and lokmades (doughnut balls dipped in syrup).21 Under the title “Entrainment,” the famous Ottoman shadow theater, karagoz, is given prominence in the narrative not because of its association with Ottoman tradition but instead what is highlighted by Michailidi is the brutality of the Turks. The Ottoman administration is presented as the source of unfairness, injustice, and mistreatment of women, whereas

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the Greek population is represented by the teacher Dionysios, the educated, reasoned savior of women. This negative attitude toward the Ottomans resurfaces under subjects such as the education of women. She tells us that the “illiterate Ottomans deprived women of an education” and made men “masters of their wives.”22 It is at this point that I want to introduce the second narrative, the art-historical narrative constructed around the work of the Greek Cypriot artist George Georghiou. The essay by the Greek Cypriot art historian Eleni Nikita, titled “George Georghiou: A Pioneering Painter of Cypriot Modernism,”23 attempts to place his work within the canon of Cypriot painters and at the same time within the influences of European modernism. We are informed that his work is inspired by symbolism, cubism, and expressionism, among others, and especially the work of Modigliani, with his elongated figures, and El-Greco.24 The placing of Georghiou’s oeuvre with European modernism works by endowing Greek Cypriot culture with a sense of modernity and progress, while at the same time, banishing Turkish Cypriot culture to the East and denigrating it as backward.25 Despite the associations with European modernism, Georghiou’s work is, according to Nikita, deeply steeped in the traditions of Byzantine art.26 This sudden shift in influences on his art functions in order to establish beyond any doubt the Greekness of his artistic output which culminates with the claim that he “drew the thematic content of his work from the landscape, scenes of everyday life, traditions and the recent historical reality of Cyprus.”27 Through the spaces of everyday life and its people, past and present, “he was searching for the true spirit of his country”28 hence his numerous representations of the traditional people of Cypriot villages and, in support of this, Nikita quotes as Georghiou saying, “they are the only real beings on the island”29 in order to conclude that the paintings are a testimony to this. Most importantly, for Nikita, are the associations with folk Cypriot art such as “thin, black outlines,” “uniform colors,” and “flat surfaces,”30 which according to the author help organize the paintings in a “vertical direction.”31 The other influence that Nikita stresses in relation to his paintings is none other than what Michailidi also highlighted in her narrative, the shadow theater karagoz. However, this Ottoman tradition is appropriated by Nikita as Greek Cypriot folk art thus denying Georghiou’s work the possibility of Ottoman transcultural exchanges. There is no doubt Georghiou painted many scenes from Cypriot life and its people but among his paintings are works like Camels at Famagusta Gate (1951), Talking to His Beast (1952), Two Turks from Knodara (1952), Turkish Cypriot Couple (1963), and The Seven Hodjas at the Cathedral (1963). These works are representations of the Turkish Cypriot community and its people, customs and religion but are not even mentioned in Nikita’s essay and yet they reveal, as in Michailidis’s account, the transcultural Ottoman exchanges which both authors deny incorporating in their narratives. As in the case of Nikita, the narrative throughout Michailidi’s writing is one of an intimate relationship with the city and its people, their traditions and professions, education, health, and entertainment. However, in both narratives this is a very homogeneous population and other than the mention of the British colonial administration and the “good” they did to the island, one gets the impression that this is a mono-cultural community. However, this projected mono-culturalism is challenged from within the narrative itself with sudden revealing comments: that the

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doctors came from Syria and Constantinople;32 the dentist and photographers were Armenian;33 the first bank to serve the town was the Ottoman Bank;34 and the mattress maker was a Turk who, according to Michailidi, provided a “colorful note” in the streets of the town: They were picturesque in their Turkish white vraka [traditional trousers], the rose colored shirts and their eastern slippers. The mattress maker was indispensable. Once a year every housewife considered it necessary to refresh the suffering mattresses and pillows. They were all made of cotton and with much use they hardened, so once a year, they needed to be softened.35

The interesting juxtaposition between hardness and softness in the narrative sheds light on the relationship between the Greek and Turkish communities and the transcultural exchanges taking place which the narrative does not want to directly reveal. The mattress that encapsulates comfort, rest, and intimacy is entrusted to the skillful hands of the Turkish mattress maker to be transformed once again into a soft, inviting, and restful cocoon. One can never know if Michailidi is conscious of her effacement of the transcultural exchanges or she is just blind to the contradiction that she is inadvertently expressing. It is not until the very end of Michailidi’s narrative—the last three chapters—that a different picture starts to emerge. The chapter dedicated to the walled town provides the antidote to the veiling that informs the rest of the narrative. Here, we are informed that during the Ottoman period the walled city was occupied solely by Turks because of the restrictions placed by the authorities that tended to segregate the various religious minorities. It is only with the arrival of the British in 1878 that the old city opened up again to the Greek community, and many Greeks moved there. Michalidi informs us that the “cohabitation with the Turks was very good” and “a friendship always existed between the Turks and Greeks in Varosi and Famagusta.”36 On many occasions they exchanged social visits. During the festivities of Ramadan, for example, Turkish Cypriots used to send presents, kanisia, to their Greek friends consisting of big trays of ekmekkataif and the Greeks reciprocated this during Christmas by sending zaxarota and flaounes during Easter. Once again, it is the colorfulness of the Turkish characters that is remembered by Michailidi: “The inhabitants with the red fez, the hodja dressed all in white, the women (hanoum) with their faces covered.”37 These are of course the same figures that inhabit Geoghiou’s paintings and that Nikita erased from her narrative.38 Also, importantly, ruins become the other major characteristic of the old city in Michailidi’s narrative, in contrast to the new city, which is remembered as a place of constant change, expansion, and modernization. The ruins of the old city are part of Georghiou’s oeuvre as well, with works such as The Blue Card (1948), St George (1951), and St George (1957). One of the “colorful characters” Michailidi describes is the image of the small silhouette of the old hanoum [lady]. Her bowed head covered, she used to pass by without ever speaking to anyone. They used to say that she was a Turkish princess, daughter of Sultan Abdulhamid II, and that she was under British protection: “Who knows who she was this lonely creature who used to glide amongst the ruins of the old

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city, a ruin herself.”39 The ruined city and the ruined self merge into one, in order to move to the next chapter that is titled “The Medieval Ruins.” These are the ruins of 365 churches built mainly during the Lusignan occupation of the city and were “a miracle in carved stone.”40 Under Ottoman rule, many of the churches were destroyed and the stones, which according to Michailidi were beautifully carved by the most skillful stone masons, were used to build houses and some of them were even exported to construct Port-Said in Egypt.41 The ruination of the city by the Ottoman army in 1571, and its medieval splendor, becomes the focus of the history of the city for a number of Greek Cypriot authors. For Anna Marangou, “Medieval Famagusta is what is most precious and symbolic in Cyprus today”42 and its fall and ruination by the Ottoman army of the “last bastion of Christendom left its mark on Europe.”43 This, according to Marangou, makes Famagusta a “proud, ruined, fading memory of glory and grandeur, a mosaic at once of the magnificence and fall of man.”44 Marangou’s narrative is further accentuated by a quotation she gives on the frontispiece of her publication by George Georghiou: “Ruins of churches, bodies and souls, Famagusta.”45 The ruins of Famagusta become metaphors for two distinct but closely related issues: nostalgia for a pre-Ottoman past and the erasure of the Ottoman heritage of the town. Nostalgia has been seen by social commentators as a “social disease”46 or, as Svetlana Boym argues, “nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups and nations, between personal and collective memory.”47 She distinguishes between restorative nostalgia which attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home as evidence of truth and tradition and by contrast, reflective nostalgia which is about the longing itself and concentrates on challenging the idea of absolute truth. Most importantly, for Boym, reflective nostalgia “allows us to distinguish between national memory that is based on a single plot of national identity and social memory, which consists of collective frameworks that mark but do not define the individual memory.”48 The restorative nostalgia of Michailidi and Georghiou manifests itself by lingering on the Christian medieval ruins of Famagusta and provides the seamless construction of a Christian past as evidence of the Greekness and Christian tradition of the island. The destruction of the churches becomes a paradigm of the perceived barbarity of the Ottomans. This is stressed further by Michailidi by the way three of these churches were converted into mosques. Tall minarets were added, which “tore apart the sky and the voice of the muezzin could be heard in the afternoon.”49 The metaphor of the torn sky and the intrusive voice of the muezzin are used as indications of the perceived injury inflicted on the Greek community. Both Michailidi’s and Georghiou’s work unwittingly provide possibilities to emerge. Michailidi’s very last paragraph states that the impact of progress on the town was most noticeable in its changed symbols: “The white jasmine that could be found everywhere disappeared. It was replaced by cultivated, scentless roses imported from Europe.”50 The delicate jasmine smell that characterized the town but was also the characteristic smell of the Levant and large areas of the Ottoman Empire disappeared from the cultural memory of the island. Knowingly or not, Michailidi admits here the existence of an Ottoman heritage in the smell of jasmine, in the same way that Georghiou refers to another aspect of Ottoman heritage, coffee. A pair of paintings, The Very Sweet [Coffee]

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of Cyprus (1954), are almost identical except from a subtle difference in the color of the tray on which the cup of coffee is placed. However, this subtle difference denotes a political act, one that has its roots in British colonial rule and the substitution of the Ottoman millet system with political subjectivities based on ethnicity: one tray is painted blue, the ethnic color of the Greek Cypriot community, and the other is red, for the Turkish Cypriot community. How can contemporary art practices de-territorialize the territorialization of Cypriot cultural memory through nationalistic discourses? Cypriot contemporary artists engage with transcultural Ottoman memories that the above discussion has revealed to challenge the absolute truths and seamless narratives of an imagined historical past that erases the Ottoman past of the island or treats it as a period of oppression and backwardness. Moving from the town of Famagusta to the contemporary the work of Klitsa Antoniou, Lia Lapithi, and Özge Ertanin demonstrates how transcultural customs function not only as vehicles for challenging nationalistic discourses but also as catalysts for healing the wounds of the many years of ethnic conflict that divided the Greek and Turkish Communities.

Ottoman Coffee and Transcultural Dialogues Klitsa Antoniou’s video Experimental Storytelling (2009), first commissioned by NeMe IDEODROME51 in 2009, was exhibited as part of the Sarajevo Winter Festival 2016 at the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the same room where the history of the siege of Sarajevo is exhibited. Antoniou’s video includes three different forms of fortune telling (tarot cards, psychic, coffee cup) all of which use a dress as their focal point, a little flower-patterned dress that the artist was wearing as a child during the 1974 events in Cyprus. The artist states: “As fortune-tellers attempt to tell the past and the fortune of the little dress—without the knowledge that this was my dress when I was a child, they construct the story of an unknown person who is me.”52 Food, and coffee in particular, with its shared Ottoman heritage becomes the necessary ingredient for the work of artists from both the Greek and Turkish communities. Coffee in Greek is known as kafes and has its roots in the Turkish word kahveh which in turn comes from the Arabic kahwa. In both Greece and Cyprus until recently it was known as “Turkish coffee,” but especially following the events of 1974 in both countries, “Turkish coffee” became “Greek coffee.”53 During the Ottoman Empire coffee, which was first imported from Yemen, was originally consumed in religious ceremonies or taken by medical prescription and it was not until the eighteenth century that its use became widespread and coffee-houses emerged.54 Telling one’s fortune from a coffee cup involves drinking the cup’s content, which reveals a thick layer of sediments at the bottom. Then the cup is surrendered to the fortune teller who turns it upside-down, emptying the sediments onto a saucer. This sedimented matter, coming from the bottom up, is perceived as writing one’s past, present, and future.55 It is a practice that has been stigmatized by the Greek orthodox church but despite this, it is still a very common practice among women in Greece,56 Cyprus, and throughout the ex-Ottoman world.

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This construction of the self is part of the tradition of coffee fortune telling. We don’t see any faces in the video, just the hands of the fortune tellers. “I sense a wound, akin to a child’s trauma,” the psychic fortune teller tells the artist while holding the dress. The next shot moves to the coffee fortune teller who states that “I cannot tell you whether that [the traumatic event] was in the past or it is in the future. It is all confusing.” And then, while pointing her index finger at the bottom of the cup she says: “the blackness at the bottom is an animal. It is a good animal because it opens its arms and grasps the dress” which Antoniou is holding in her hands. “It protects you. Can you see it?,” while pointing to the cup for Antoniou to see. “Whatever is in the present, it is in the future.” While turning the cup in her hands the fortune teller sees all “clouds dissolved” and she keeps turning the cup over saying: “I see health, wealth, joy,” and that the girl who had this dress will “thrive in the future or she has already thrived,” as she points to what she perceives as a “path that leads to an opening.” The video ends with a photograph of Antoniou with her mother and sister, in 1974, standing outside a tent at the Xylotimpou refugee camp where they temporarily settled, following their expulsion from their family home in the village of Assia, in the north part of the island. There is a lot of intimacy but at the same time some playfulness in the act of fortune telling and, as Zeynep Gürsel stated in relation to her own short film on coffee fortune telling Following Coffee Futures (2009), there is polyvalence in fortune telling which enables “unexpected virtual encounters between people, registers of speech, and domains of life that do not usually intersect.”57 Gürsel uses coffee fortune telling as

Figure 11.1  Klitsa Antoniou, Experimental Storytelling (2009). Image courtesy of the artist.

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commentary on Turkey’s attempts to join the European Union and the complexities of negotiating the future of the country which requires “negations with populations with which there have been long-standing grievances, whether Armenian, Kurdish, Greek or Cypriot.”58 In Antoniou’s work this polyvalence brings together the Ottoman past of the island, the traumatic events that both the artist and ethnic communities witnessed in 1974, and the future, in a memory assemblage. This is a bodily memory assemblage and, as Nadia Seremetakis argues, “coffee-cup reading is strictly related to the body and the senses and to a material substance, coffee,” and it exemplifies syncretic elements.59 More importantly, the act of reading the coffee cup turns the fortune teller into a witness. In the video, the coffee-cup reader becomes the witness to the trauma that the artist suffered as a child, the trauma of war and of losing one’s home. This witnessing, through its gestures—the pointing of the finger, the turning of the cup, and the intrusive eye of the reader when reading the coffee cup—readdresses the “pained body” and “reassembles” it, in an act of healing.60 The coffee cup features also in the work of the Turkish Cypriot artist Özge Ertanin. The installation Proposition (2010) was shown at the group exhibition at Maroudia’s (July–December 2012) at the House of Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios which houses the Ethnological Museum of Cyprus and was curated by the group Re Aphrodite.61 Ertanin’s installation consists of a number of coffee cups placed in the drying position of the act of fortune telling, that is, upside down. The coffee cup is read when the “writing” inside has solidified. While the residue is still wet and soft, the cup, and by implication the person’s fortune, is still forming. The future is solidified when the residue is solidified, and it has acquired its final shape, color, and texture.62 Ertanin’s coffee cups, ready to be read in their solidified state, reveal not someone else’s future but her one past, present, and future. In its intricacy, this diachronic assemblage reveals small-scale sculptures from the artist’s everyday life. They show kitchen utensils, a wedding dress, and some of the symbols used in the tradition of coffee fortune readings. The cup, according to Seremetakis, represents the body and it is read by its various parts—the heart, mind, eyes, ears—which are transposed on the cup as symbols. The markings on the cup represent feelings, thoughts, and senses. In reading the cup, these parts enter a process of exchange between the reader and the receiver. The arrangement of these parts in the cup guides the reader who reassembles the dispersed objects in the cup and it is exactly this re-combination of objects that provides the interpretation which the reader feels, senses, and communicates.63 The assemblage of coffee cups and the miniature sculptures from her personal life becomes the alloys that bring the personal and the historical together in the setting of the ethnographic museum, and the house and its history, so as to question, and most importantly, recombine like the artist did, the personal in relation to the cultural memory that has been constructed around the Ottoman past of Cyprus. The house of Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios is stepped in the Ottoman history of Cyprus. He was one of the most powerful men on the island at the turn of the nineteenth century. His role as dragoman—translator—for the local Ottoman authorities was a complex one. He offered his local knowledge to the local Ottoman authorities and in exchange he was given important power and authority by the central authorities in Istanbul. Under these authorities, he became a successful merchant, moneylender,

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Figure 11.2  Özge Ertanin, Proposition, presented at Maroudia’s, Re-Aphrodite exhibition (2012–13). Image courtesy of Re-Aphrodite.

landowner, tax collector, and an important political figure in Cyprus.64 He very much represents the functioning of the Deluzian assemblage where the assemblage’s “only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a sympathy.” It is never concerned with affiliations, but rather with alliances, which Deleuze calls “alloys.”65 The house and its Ottoman spaces both provide the territorial side of the assemblage, the inclusion of Hadjigeorgakis’s story in Greek Cypriot national narratives as someone who died because of the cruelty of the Ottoman regime and reveal the deterritorialized side of the assemblage and the alliances that flourished under Ottoman rule. In addition, the two main ethnic communities of Cyprus have a very different construction of the cultural memory of the Ottoman Empire. Ertanin who is Turkish Cypriot brings to the house of Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios and to the visitor her version of the cultural memory of the Ottoman Empire and, like a fortune teller, provides the interpretation of the relationship of the Ottoman past of the island and its communities through an assemblage of personal and cultural memories and the transmediality of the work that allows for a reconfiguration of the Ottoman history of the island. Food and history, or rather the erasure of history, are also the main preoccupations of another installation at the At Maroudia’s exhibition. Lia Lapithi’s work An Ethnic Food for the Ethnological Museum … Moussaka (2012) is a video installation in the dining room of the house of Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios. The video is a demonstration by Lapithi and her mother cooking the famous dish of moussaka which is considered as one of Greece’s national dishes. What the video reveals in its opening credits are the history of the dish and its adaptation in the early twentieth century by the Greek chef Nikolaos Tselementes (1878–1958). The original Ottoman dish, patlikanmousakka, was Europeanized by Tselementes and subsequently by Greek Cypriots in order to reflect

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the Westernizing Greek national identity at the time and the rejection of its Ottoman past that was considered to be un-civilized and barbaric. Tselementes, by adding a layer of the French sauce béchamel at the top of the original Ottoman dish literally enclosing and metaphorically purifying the dish, and its associated transcultural

Figure 11.3  Lia Lapithi, An Ethnic Food for the Ethnological Museum … Moussaka (2012). Image courtesy of the artist.

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memories, erases its Ottoman history, in a similar way that the Greek nation adopted the ideals of the French revolution to erase its Ottoman past. The installation in the space of the museum with its pristine table settings provides a transmedial, embodied transcultural exchange with the Ottoman past of the space. The visitor is invited to enter into an embodied relationship with the past through the sense of taste and smell. As we watch the video, we can sense the smell of the fried aubergines, mincemeat, onions, and the various herbs the two women are using. This embodied participation enables a transculturation of memories to question certain assumptions in relation to the most fundamental aspects and symbols of what is considered to be part of a “pure” and “unadulterated” national identity, a plate of moussaka. The narratives of ethnic nationalism erased the richness of Ottoman transcultural memories and the artists I have discussed above have attempted to unearth the buried past by creating transmedial memory assemblages using symbols and covert references: Ottoman coffee-cup readings, traditional food recipes, Ottoman landmarks, and the transcultural richness of Ottoman cities.

Re-Imagining and Re-Building Famagusta by Way of Conclusion Returning to the town of Famagusta where this essay began, the artist Katerina Attalidou who was born a few months before the events of 1974, and “never had the opportunity to experience life” in the town, “visited the area many times, stood on the beachfront looking at the wrecked buildings, swam in the waters, as far as it is permitted,” and “drove all around its periphery.” Importantly, she “took photos secretly” and “listened to the scarce sounds.” Because the “barbed wire going round the city kept” her “at a distance” she felt she “could not capture the city, establish a relationship with it.”66 The artist sought to establish a post-memory that will connect her to Famagusta which led her to a search for images of the town before the events of 1974. Attalidou working with another artist, Stefanos Karababas, appropriated found images of the city such as postcards and family albums. This allowed them to closely observe the town thus “annihilating the time gap, between the past and present” in order to fill the void of not having actually experienced the city by imaginatively entering the space, thereby creating a “certain kind of experiencing and connection.”67 The collage, or rather assemblage, of time and space is best encapsulated in I Don’t Know if I Am Convincing; the City Seems Not to Trust Me Any More (2011). In the upper section of the work, a series of photographs from the 1960s and 1970s, depicting the high-rise hotels that became symbolic of the town in the aftermath of the events of 1974, are juxtaposed with a series of images of the medieval town. The minarets and ruins of the city are symbolic of this part of the town and the ones that Michailidi and Georghiou associated with the Ottoman history of the town, and its destructiveness and barbarity take a different meaning here. The temporality of the assemblage and its enclosure in a grid-like structure by the artists with the juxtaposition of a collage of an airplane, palm tree, and a donkey to the left of the work produce a memory assemblage. Past, present, and future are brought together and create a connection to the town and its people.

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Figure 11.4  Katerina Attalidou and Stefanos Karababas, I Don’t Know if I Am Convincing; the City Seems Not to Trust Me Any More, 2011. Image courtesy of the artist.

Famagusta in English, Ammohostos in Greek, Magusa in Turkish, Varosi for the inhabitants of the town, the town goes by many names. According to Socratis Stratis et al., one of the founding members of the Hands on Famagusta project, if we search the internet under the different names of the town, different sets of images appear. A search using “Famagusta” or “Ammohostos” reveals images of the deserted seafront of the town that has been left empty and decaying since 1974. This “no man’s land” image has become emblematic of the town, which is also often referred to as a ghost town. If we search for Magusa, images of the historic city within its Venetian walls appear. Interestingly, the name Varosi, which as we saw Michailidi favors in her narrative when describing the Greek Cypriot part of the town, outside the walls, comes from the Turkish word Varosh, meaning suburb.68 The project adopted a portable model of the town, face-to-face roundtable workshops and an interactive digital platform. The digital platform uses a playful model of “designerly” knowledge exchange to

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transform established representations of the ethnic conflict in Cyprus and images of the town.69 It provides an opportunity for visitors to the website to playfully realign and deterritorialize the borders of the assemblage of images and ethno-nationalist narratives that are entrenched within both communities. The digital platform and its interactivity offer an alternative way of representing the heterogeneity of Cypriot memory cultures. The time-space in which the assemblage of Famagusta is imagined is both stable and unstable, and infused with movement and change; its intent is to undermine such monolithic structures by offering the possibility of expressing difference. How do we rebuild a city? How do we uncover layers of hidden, buried memories? How do we address the traumatic memories of the island? The memories evoked by the artists discussed in this chapter are no longer territorialized within the confines of national borders but move beyond them and across temporalities to produce through their transmediality a constellation of meanings that can exist independently of the materiality of the artworks. They produce potentialities that shift present discussions of memory, the notion of the global and local, personal, political, and cultural memories, in order to reveal assemblages of meanings, affiliations, and connections. More importantly, they invite us to become archaeologists who will excavate transcultural memory exchanges, the parallel spaces they inhabit and their temporalities thus revealing traces of memory, which are often related to traumatic events and what appears at first as a perverse nostalgia for such instances. However, these works and the transcultural memories of violence and the resulting trauma of the uprooting of populations provide the finite edges of deterritorialization that destabilize the territorial assemblage of the nation and its homogeneity. The “homing” of transcultural memories results in creating a parallelotopia, two temporally synchronous and affectively parallel spaces which one could inhabit. The transcultural memory exchanges that emerge here work to destabilize the imposed artificial spatial boundaries in Cyprus. These transcultural memories, as well as importantly the emotion and affect that such memories entail, provide possibilities of acknowledging the self and the other.

Notes Andreas Huyssen, “Memories of Europe in the Art from Elsewhere,” Stedelijk Studies, 2018, 1–10, April 26, 2018, https://www.stedelijkstudies.com/journal/memories-ofeurope-in-the-art-from-elsewhere, 1. 2 Ibid. 3 Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 4–18, 4. 4 Ibid. 5 Publications that address cultural memory in Cyprus are: R. Bryant and Y. Papadakis, eds., Cyprus and the Politics of Memory: History, Community and Conflict (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012); Stephanos Stephanides, ed., Cultures of Memory, Memories of Culture (Nicosia: University of Nicosia Press, 2007). 6 William Seitz, The Art of Assemblage (New York: Museum of Modern Art; Distributed by Doubleday, 1961), https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1880. Frontispiece. 1

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Manuel De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London; New York: Continuum, 2006), 121. 8 Seitz, Assemblage, 83–4. 9 Julia Kelly, “The Anthropology of Assemblage,” Art Journal 67, no. 1 (2008): 24–30, 30. 10 Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 11 Rebecca Bryant, Post-Ottoman Coexistence: Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016); Nicholas Doumanis, Before the Nation: MuslimChristian Coexistence and Its Destruction in Late Ottoman Anatolia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 12 Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011); FatmaMüge Göçek, “Postcoloniality, The Ottoman Past, and the Middle East Present,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44, no. 3 (2012): 549–63; Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 768–96. 13 George E. Marcus and Erkan Saka, “Assemblage,” Theory, Culture and Society 23, no. 2–3 (2006): 101–6, 102. 14 Anna Reading, “Globalisation and Digital Memory: Globital Memory’s Six Dynamics,” in On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age (Basingstoke, Hampshire [England]; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 241–52, 241. 15 Guide to Common Urban Imaginaries in Contested Spaces: The “Hands-on Famagusta” Project, ed. Socrates Stratis and Jovis Verlag GmbH (Berlin: Jovis, 2016); “Hands on Famagusta,” http://handsonfamagusta.org/home (accessed June 22, 2018); Famagusta Ecocity Project, https://www.ecocityproject.org/ (accessed June 22, 2018). 16 The city of Famagusta is known in Greek either as Amohostos or as Varosi. Amohostos or Famagusta was the name of the old city within the perimeters of the Venetian walls and Varosi was the name of the new town built outside the walls of the old city. 17 Agni Michailidi, Το Παλιό Βαρώσι [The Old Famagusta] (Nicosia, Cyprus, 1970). 18 George Pol. Georghiou, Exhibition Catalogue (Nicosia, Cyprus: Cultural Services, Ministry of Education and Culture; The A.G. Leventis Foundation, 1999). 19 Michailidi, Famagusta, 9. 20 Ibid., 44. 21 Ibid., 59. 22 Ibid., 83. It is interesting to note here that Ottoman women could own property and it is why when Tzielepis Yiangos (Hadjigeorgakis son, whose case will be discussed in the next section) buys back the house, it is from a Turkish woman, Hatize Hanoum Magnisli in 1830. 23 Eleni Nikita, “George Georghiou: A Pioneering Painter of Cypriot Modernism,” in George Pol. Georghiou, Exhibition Catalogue (Nicosia, Cyprus: Cultural Services, Ministry of Education and Culture; The A.G. Leventis Foundation, 1999), 16–35. 24 Ibid., 21. 25 For a discussion of the rise of nationalisms in Cyprus and its associations with modernity and progress, see Rebecca Bryant, Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004). For a discussion of modernity in artistic production, see Antonis Danos, “Twentieth-Century Greek Cypriot Art: An ‘Other’ Modernism on the Periphery,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 32, no. 2 7

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(2014): 217–52; Elena Stylianou and Nikos Philippou, “Greek-Cypriot Locality: (Re) Defining Our Understanding of European Modernity,” in A Companion to Modern Art, ed. Pam Meecham (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), 339–58. 26 Nikita, “George Georghiou,” 25. 27 Ibid., 19. 28 Ibid., 25. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 29. 32 Michailidi, Famagusta, 101. 33 Ibid., 103. 34 Ibid., 117. 35 Ibid., 126. 36 Ibid., 169. 37 Ibid. 38 Danos points out the multi-ethnic approach of Georghiou to the people of Cyprus but does not engage with their representation. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 172. 41 Ibid. 42 Anna Marangou and Andreas Coutas, Famagusta: The Story of the City (Nicosia, Cyprus: s.n., 2005), 7. 43 Ibid., 11. 44 Ibid., 13. 45 Ibid., frontispiece. 46 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1993), ix. 47 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xvi. 48 Ibid., xvii. 49 Michailidi, Famagusta, 172. 50 Ibid., 195. 51 “IDEODROME 2009 | NeMe,” http://www.neme.org/events/ideodrome-2009 (accessed June 26, 2018). 52 Klitsa Antoniou, “Experimental Storytelling,” The Times of Cyprus (Limassol, Cyprus, November 17, 2010), 4. 53 The naming of the sweet known as Turkish Delight is similar to that of coffee. See, Yiannis Papadakis, “Aphrodite Delights,” Postcolonial Studies 9, no. 3 (2006): 237–50. 54 Mary Banks, Christine McFadden, and Catherine Atkinson, The World Encyclopedia of Coffee: The Definitive Guide to Coffee, from Simple Bean to Irresistible Beverage (London: Hermes House, 2014). 55 C. Nadia Seremetakis, “Divination, Media, and the Networked Body of Modernity,” American Ethnologist 36, no. 2 (2009): 337–50, 344. 56 Ibid., 341. 57 Zeynep Gürsel, “Following Coffee Futures: Reflections on Speculative Traditions and Visual Politics,” in Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, ed. Meg McLagan and Yates McKee (New York: Cambridge, MA: Zone Books; distributed by the MIT Press, 2012), 373–93, 390. 58 Ibid., 389. 59 Seremetakis, “Divination, Media,” 341.

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60 Ibid., 348. 61 “Reaphrodite | AtMaroudias,” Reaphrodite, https://www.reaphrodite.org/atmaroudias (accessed June 21, 2018). 62 Seremetakis, “Divination, Media,” 344. 63 Ibid., 345. 64 Antonis Hadjikyriacou, “The Province Goes to the Center: The Case of HadjiyorgakisKornesios, Dragoman of Cyprus,” in Living in the Ottoman Realm: Empire and Identity, 13th to 20th Centuries, ed. Christine Isom-Verhaaren and Kent F. Schull (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 240–53. 65 De Landa, Assemblage Theory, 121. 66 Katerina Attalidou, personal correspondence. 67 Ibid. 68 Socrates Stratis, eds., Guide to Common Urban Imaginaries in Contested Spaces: The “Hands-on Famagusta” Project (Berlin: Jovis, 2016), 28. 69 Ibid., 23.

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Two-Folded Account on the Attempt to Understand the Potential Source of Change in Cyprus Basak Senova

The history of Cyprus is a fraught one: the Mediterranean island has been a site of occupation and control for hundreds of years. As a curator, I was engaged with the island’s politics of division in 2010, when the Greek Cypriot curator Pavlina Paraskevaidou and I devised a collaborative research-based artistic project entitled UNCOVERED: Nicosia International Airport. The project contemplated on the closed Nicosia International Airport as a site for investigating the mechanisms of control at work on the island—divided since 1974 and subject to a UN Peacekeeping Force since 1964—alongside notions of memory and commons. In this respect, the first part of this textual contribution is a text that was first published in www.ibraaz.org, May 2, 2012, edited by Anthony Downey.1 The text discussed the works and activities by artists participating in the UNCOVERED project laid the ground for the Occupy Buffer Zone movement that developed in late 2011 and which sought to occupy that which was already occupied. In an action, which exposed the absurdity of the controls on the beleaguered island, these activities rendered disused public spaces public once more. Subsequently, the second part continues with a very brief and general view of the current situation of the art activities that take place in the island through the path of another project: Confrontation through Art, which took place in 2015 and 2016. Through a comparative reading of two artistic activities and an activist intervention as the authors of “transitory zones,” this part presents a modest attempt to assess the significance of congested areas used and accepted by the public in Cyprus.

PART 1 Occupying the Occupied: Perceptions of Occupation and Control in Cyprus According to Paul Virilio “it is important to understand that occupation is both physical and mental (preoccupation).”2 The word “occupation”3 is essentially defined

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through the action of “taking or holding possession or control of ”; nevertheless, the same word is layered through an alternation of multiple occupiers within a same territory.4 This has been the case in Cyprus since 1974, when a military coup by the Greek Cypriots with the support of the military junta in Greece was launched.5 Turkey’s subsequent response was to send troops to the island as a guarantor state and these troops have never left. It was then partitioned by United Nations mandate, and a buffer zone between North and South under the control of the UN was created. The island is now controlled by multiple but different authorities and the experience, along with the acceptance of occupation for the islanders, takes different forms. Such an experience denotes a prolonged and deplorably normalized situation as the island has been technically in a cease-fire for the last forty-four years. Cyprus has been subjected to occupation throughout its history, by the empires of the Hittites, Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Rashiduns, Umayyads, Lusignans, Venetians, and Ottomans.6 Britain also occupied Cyprus in 1878 and annexed the island in 1914.7 My first encounter with this history was through the UNCOVERED: Nicosia International Airport project.8 UNCOVERED is a three-year (2010–12) research-based art project, divided into two phases, and its areas of investigation are the issues stemming from the prolonged condition of the closed Nicosia International Airport.9 With the UNCOVERED project, we sought to encompass the key concepts of “commons,” “memory,” and “control mechanisms.” The abandoned avant-garde modernist building of the International Nicosia Airport (See Figure 12.1), which has not been accessible since the island was totally divided in 1974, embodies a potential for the investigation of all of these key concepts. Located inside the buffer zone, the airport has been closed to the public and under the control of the United Nations for the last thirty-seven years. The site is mainly used as the headquarters base of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus. The project started as a collaborative one with the UN Goods Offices in 2010 and continued to take shape with an independent development team and a curatorial direction. In order to operate within the entire island, the structure of any act had to be bi-communal. My co-curator Pavlina Paraskevaidou is a Greek Cypriot who belongs to one of the communities in the island, but as a Turkish national my part in this collaboration was totally opposed to the accepted scheme.10 For any cultural project to be sanctioned, it must be run as a collaboration between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, or between Greeks and Turks, but not between an islander from either side and either a Turkish or Greek national. For this reason, I have not been recognized— or in some cases even semi-recognized—by the UN in official terms. Therefore, my national identity (regardless of my viewpoint) has always been considered a threat— not only by the UN, but also by various authorities and some individuals from the island. Nevertheless, this bizarre position has also helped me to collect, disseminate, and discuss the perspectives and realities of diverse positions in multiple formats. During the course of the UNCOVERED project, either inspired by the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement or as the likely outcome of being silent for such a long time, there have been various demonstrations and protests on the island. In July, April, and October of 2011, protests against statements made by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan by Turkish Cypriots took place. Then, in July 2011, Greek Cypriots

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protested for several nights against their government after the blast in Evangelos Florakis naval base in Mari, which knocked out the island’s main power station. A few smaller-scale demonstrations took place, against the presence of British military bases in Cyprus; against the drilling for oil and gas that was taking place off the coast of the disputed island; and against the North’s proposals to build oil and gas storage tanks in the fields of Karpas, near the Yedikonuk village. Nevertheless, the perception of occupation and the belated reaction toward the forms of it on the island have been only visible in the recent Occupy Buffer Zone actions (2011). This movement has different intentions and motives than Occupy Wall Street or Occupy London, which are ostensibly protests against inequality, unemployment, and homelessness. Occupy Buffer Zone, however, tends “to protest and inform [about] the problems of the global economic and political system”; its priority is to attract attention to the prolonged Cyprus problem by criticizing all of the actors of the problem—including the UN.11 The UN’s presence has never been loudly (or deeply) questioned by the islanders but can only be discussed within the UN’s own pre-set terms and conditions. Yet my experience with the UNCOVERED project also proved that in spite of the good and sincere intentions of the UN Goods Offices (and largely due to its own structural mechanism), the UN as an entity simply cannot allow for any diverse voice or discussion on the island.12 Hence, some basic imperatives of control have been articulated and rearticulated by the public without question. In this respect, Occupy Buffer Zone has been important in foregrounding the many voices on the island, regardless of the nationalities and ideologies of the protestors. They managed to utilize the buffer zone as an interface to express different opinions and discussions: We have occupied the space of the buffer zone to express with our presence our mutual desire for reunification and to stand in solidarity with the wave of unrest which has come as a response to the failings of the global systemic paradigm. We want to promote understanding of the local problem within this global context and in this way show how the Cyprus Problem is but one of the many symptoms of an unhealthy system. In this way, we have reclaimed the space of the buffer zone to create events (screenings, talks etc.) and media of these events, which relate to the system as a whole and its numerous and diverse consequences. Opinions expressed in this manner are not necessarily of the entire group, only the umbrella points of reunification and solidarity with the global movement can be assumed to be.13

The protest movement began in October 2011 by Greek and Turkish Cypriot activists, in the Ledra/Lokmaci checkpoint, in Nicosia, Cyprus. It is one of the three zones that allow crossings only on foot and spans 80 meters. In November 2011, the occupation of the buffer zone became permanent. UNCOVERED project’s first exhibition was also realized in the same buffer zone, in an abandoned building belonging to the Kykkos Monastery. At that time, we managed to get permission from various authorities (such as the UN, both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot police forces, militaries as well as from the Kykkos Monastery. The

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buffer zone was the natural location for an international (but also bi-communal) event, as it designates a “non-place” or “less-place,” to use Marc Augé’s term.14 It is also considered to be the only place on the island that is politically/ideologically/culturally “neutral.” What was very unique about this exhibition was the fact that not only we used an abandoned building, frozen in time since the 1970s, but also we managed to use the crossing for installing Andreas Savva’s work, which replicated the seats at Nicosia International Airport and placed them outside the venue in the buffer zone. These seats worked as the first seating units in the buffer zone. Accordingly, Savva altered the function of the Ledra/Lokmaci crossing from a transitory zone to a standard public space that people could spend time in. This alteration then expanded to become a site for Occupy Buffer Zone. The buffer zone is still a transitory place (and passageway) that people pass through but is now transformed to a public space of criticism and reflection. Stavros Stavrides, who has published several books and articles on spatial theory by focusing on emancipating spatial practices, discusses in the UNCOVERED book that “public space is indeed defined by the context which molds its uses and social meanings but we need to understand context not simply as a state of things but rather as an ongoing process. Public space is always in the making.”15 In this way, he underlines the fact that the public always has the potential to change and to be perceived as something else. This perception is invariably related to how it is defined and used by the public (the users); only then does the “contest become framed in a significantly different context.”16 In this context, the occupation of the buffer zone by the users of the buffer zone is not only ironic but also quite revealing of the overloaded and abnormal situation

Figure 12.1  Nicosia International Airport. Photo by Basak Senova, 2011.

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on the island. This frankly innocent and peaceful activity by a group of people in an area 80 meters long was perceived as a very serious threat by those controlling the buffer zone and the other authorities relying on this control mechanism.17 In the same vein, an anecdote I heard from the protestors there unfolds an entire reading of such innocent activities and contemporary art by the authorities. In the following week of the permanent occupation in November 2011, UN officers approached the protestors and informed them that they could not do a bi-communal activity without the permission of the UN. The protestor’s reply was direct and simple: “It is not an activity, as we are occupying the buffer zone.” These conversations could lead us to long discussions about the usefulness and uselessness of art-related activities in politically charged situations. At the same time, one could also investigate the ways in which art could function as a strategy to underline what is not spoken. In this case, I believe that all the preceding cultural and art-related activities on the island prepared the ground for Occupy Buffer Zone. What they are achieving is the bringing together of people to discuss and question the situation, and this goes beyond the territories of the buffer zone. These protestors are also equipped to use social media and other communication channels: Occupy Buffer Zone does have a webpage/blog,18 radio station,19 and a Facebook page,20 and the protestors are connected with other activists all around the world. This makes for an edifying example of what Saskia Sassen questions with regard to the function of connectivity when discussing “the complex interactions between power and powerlessness” through the vectors of the worldwide uprisings: How can the new social media add to functions that go beyond mere communication and thereby contribute to more complex and powerful capabilities for such movements? The rapid spread of Occupy initiatives across the United States and most recently extending to over eighty countries is one instance of such a multi-sited global formation that does not require direct communication, even when social media is a critical tool.21

The new social media—which was discovered long ago as a strategic tool by contemporary artists—is indeed the right tool for disseminating information and diverse voices without (or at least with a reduced amount of) censorship. In this respect, despite the economic, cultural, and ideological bubble flying the contemporary art field, the UNCOVERED project shows that art can still be utilized as an information channel that can trigger social movements and even revolutionary motivations in some cases.

PART 2 Notes on the Potential of Void Stavros Stavrides asks what are the consequences “if emptiness does not exactly describe the status of a certain urban terrain, but rather the result of a finished process or the potentiality of a process that may begin?” and “what if emptiness is rather the end or the beginning of an action imagined by those who observe it?”22

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In the course of the UNCOVERED: Nicosia International Airport project, two teams were formed which consisted of Greek and Turkish Cypriots that were working in the North and the South of the island, and they were instructed to collect data about the airport in order to develop the UNCOVERED Archive. Artists have also been conducting interviews about the airport with people from the island. The project had two phases: the first phase was dedicated to data collection and the development of these local perspectives. As I mentioned and discussed it in the first part of this chapter, the project and all the data collected were culminated in the exhibition along with the panel, presentations, and book in 2011. The second phase expanded to include international partners, and focused on data processing and case analysis through panels, workshops, presentations, and publications. Although our broad aim was also to develop and improve facilities for art production in Cyprus with the second phase, it would not be accurate to claim that the project certainty could not directly achieve this aim. Nonetheless, UNCOVERED project has received a lot of international recognition and at least provided new networks, invitations, and collaborations for its participating artists. Accordingly, the project was completed in 2012 with the book launch at Depo (Istanbul) and a final talk at SALT Beyoglu, walk-in cinema in Istanbul. UNCOVERED project has been presented through talks and panels in Beirut (Lebanon), Sharjah (UAE), Karlsruhe (Germany), Istanbul (Turkey), London (UK), St. Gallen (Switzerland), Skopje (Republic of Macedonia), Venice (Italy), Sydney (Australia), Jerusalem (Israel), Berlin (Germany), Ankara (Turkey), Detroit (USA), Vienna (Austria), Tallinn (Estonia), and Helsinki (Finland). Besides, both in Nicosia and in Kyrenia, the project was presented and discussed in some of the panels, talks, and workshops in Cyprus. The project has also been widely covered and reviewed by many international publications and some books.23 Two years after the finalization of the project, once again, I was invited to be part of another bi-communal project titled Confrontation through Art, organized by two nonprofit associations of EMAA and Rooftop24 from the island and funded by the European Union under the Cypriot Civil Society in Action program. As stated by its organizers, “the main objective of this new project is to contribute to enhancing reconciliation, peaceful co-existence, tolerance and creative problem-solving awareness and skills of diverse segments of Cypriot communities through Contemporary Art.”25 The project obviously was sharing the same aim with the initial goals of the UNCOVERED project, nevertheless, the realities of today’s Cyprus have already shifted the area of research and production of the local artists. Moreover, the well-defined focus of the project was to bring “young” artists of the two Cypriot communities together by involving other “young” artists under the supervision of some European curators26 who have previous experiences of working with young artists. This specific focus inevitably indicated new denominators to the nature of the project: new perspectives, new issues, new tensions, and even new dreams with the ever-changing political and social agenda of the island, the region, and Europe. By considering the ongoing political unrest, severe and massive migration flows from war-torn countries, clashes at the borders, terrorist attacks, censorship cases, governmental repression along with the significant violations of freedom of speech,

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economical instability in both Turkey and Greece that have had direct influence on the island along with the “constant” threat of its own conflicts, one would expect distinctive visual languages that have developed in the island. Most significantly, content-wise, there has been an emphasis on the dichotomy between nationalistic tendencies and multicultural approaches to endorse peace. However, what I have observed as a common aspect of art production of the two main communities is the methodological approach rather than aesthetics or content. In the entire island, collective projects and even project spaces run by young artists that mostly promote self-curation have started to take place. Yet they do not insist on using designated spaces for art (such as museums, art and cultural centers, and galleries) on the contrary, they challenge the well-known and accepted conventions of alternative spaces—including public areas and spaces. In this respect, Confrontation through Art was a timely project that kept the pulse of this tendency. Even though, once again an international third party27 facilitated the project, each segment of Confrontation through Art was shaped by EMAA and Rooftop and it’s participants as a thirty-month-long project. It functioned as a platform to discuss and to reflect on “a common future” rather than producing individual standpoints and perspectives. The activities of the project promoted “the recognition of the complexity of the past and the different viewpoints” that coexist in the island, while addressing “historical traumas and controversial issues.”28 Yet again in their statement of the Confrontation through Art project, Özgül Ezgin and Argyro Toumazou underlined that “the project also aimed to work with children and young people from rural areas across Cyprus, in providing them with the space and skills to work, express collectively, produce together and build trust and understand ‘the other’ through contemporary art.”29 The term “the other” is important as at the same time it also refers to “the memories and the history” of the other. As an ever-changing representation of the past, memory constructs new patterns to read history. Collective memories alter their content with social, political, and economical changes in time. Thus, individual memory develops in interaction with the diverse realities of social inputs. In an inevitable way, our memory shapes our lifestyles, and our political and ideological positions. The acts of confrontation, integration, and adaptation are possible only through these ephemeral and fragmented memories since they indicate the construction of defense mechanisms for us to cope with life. In any case of political, social, and economical imposition and repression, identities have systematically been fragmented and oppressed. At personal levels, identities are reconstructed with fragmentation of the narrations—as memory extracts—and the disconnected temporality of multiple realities. Therefore, the emphasis on “the other” indicates a path to read these multiple realities that coexist. In the same vein, strong artistic interventions also attempt to create a “Temporary Autonomous Zone” (T.A.Z). As Boyd and Mitchell explain, a T.A.Z. “seeks to preserve the creativity, energy and enthusiasm of autonomous uprisings without replicating the inevitable betrayal and violence that has been the reaction to most revolutions throughout history.”30 By creating a T.A.Z., such interventions suggest ways to potentiate their impact by intensifying everyday life31—by also taking the cultural, political, social, and economic conditions of the island into consideration. In these

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conditions, the spatial and the temporal are constantly shifting and the perception of the society is being reduced to black-and-white reading. Therefore, these artistic attempts that have the potential to create a T.A.Z. play an important role in addressing other perspectives. The segment that I was involved in the Confrontation through Art project was called “Stepping over the Borders.” Together with the Slovenian curator Alenka Gregoric, we led a team of eight artists32 and operated through a workshop in praxis, we asked artists to reflect on the diverse motivations and the consequences of the politics of border making, enforcement, and trespassing. One of the works developed during the course of the workshop was Christina Georgiou’s performance-based work, entitled “Voicing the Line” (2015). It was a 2 hours, 30 minutes performance/intervention along the Border of Nicosia in collaboration with Oya Akin. During the performance, a Greek-Cypriot woman and a Turkish-Cypriot woman were walking parallel to each other along the border of Nicosia, in an attempt to call each other’s name and to listen to each other calling one’s name (See Figures 12.2 and 12.3). The Greek-Cypriot woman was walking in the South part and the Turkish-Cypriot woman was walking in the North part of the city. Their attempt was to hear each other’s voice in order to perceive or even “measure” the thickness of the Green Line. The intention to encounter one another through their voices was also the main purpose of the action itself. As a remnant of the UNCOVERED project’s exhibition, which took place at an abandoned building, in the buffer zone

Figure 12.2  Christina Georgiou’s and Oya Akın’s performance “Voicing the Line” under the coverage of the Stepping over the Borders Exhibition, 2015, curated by Basak Senova and Alenka Gregorič. Image courtesy of the artists.

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Figure 12.3  Christina Georgiou’s and Oya Akın’s performance “Voicing the Line” under the coverage of the Stepping over the Borders Exhibition, 2015, curated by Basak Senova and Alenka Gregorič. Image courtesy of the artists.

between the Ledra Street and Lokmaci checkpoints in Nicosia, the action was taking place once again in the Green Line/the buffer zone/the neutral (at the same time the most contested) place in the island. Through this performance and its documentation, the relationship between this very place and the body also creates a transitory zone for discussion. Looking at the relationship between the body and the psycho-geographical influence of the border, Voicing the Line interrogates how we perceive or conceptualize geography bodily. This project is also questioning of how the psycho-physical experience of the border is embedded in one’s memory, while (re)constructing an experiential mapping of how the body can be used to memorize or even “measure” the border of Nicosia, while experiencing it in the “here and now.”33

While such a transitory “place”—which is not public, not private, and not owned— disguises, neutralizes, and veils a potential to criticize the current structure of the present and ongoing situation, such an act or intervention creates a resisting trace to transform the place itself as the subject of the constant political turmoil. In this instant, the intensity of the pressure of mental occupation in every possible political, territorial, spatial, psychological, economical, social layer completes the creation of a transitory zone mentally remote from this specific “place” (both the Green Line and the buffer zone), but still dependent on it. Hence, this place, which is always under the control of the UN and the corresponding authorities from both

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Figure 12.4  Andreas Savva, Waiting Lounge, 2011,  with screenshots and a photo,  UNCOVERED project curated by Basak Senova and Pavlina Paraskevaidou. Image courtesy of the artist.

sides, signifies and produces pressure, excess, and insecurity. Stavros Stavrides suggests “dead place” as a term and while he was addressing to the significance of the Occupy Buffer Zone movement activists, he refers to this dead place as “an area that does not actually unite, but continues the separation of Cyprus.”34 It is a congested area. In a like manner, Andreas Savva’s work Waiting Lounge (2011), which took place in the UNCOVERED project, focused on the notion of waiting and anticipation in reference to a solution to the Cyprus Problem. For Waiting Lounge, the artist commissioned replicas of the airport seats that were originally designed by Cypriot furniture designer Pambos Savvides. Throughout the exhibition Savva placed them on the street in front of the exhibition venue in the buffer zone (See Figure 12.4). By displacing the seats from their natural surroundings and installing them at a busy pedestrian street between the north and south checkpoints in Ledra Street/Lokmaci area, the artist transformed the place to a temporary “public space.” The same act of transforming the abandoned building,35 as an act of demonstration and resistance by the Occupy Buffer Zone movement activists, also left a similar kind of trace by creating another transitory zone. The experiences of this movement as well as the mentioned artistic interventions underline multiplied and even conflicting definitions of freedom, security, and existence under different conditions for different entities. By also perplexing the conception of “responsibility,” these transitory zones constantly demand a sort of courage that blends with unresponsiveness. Hence, they have the potential to set up new orders that sustain a tidal format for questioning.

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While hopes, passions, and dreams are also all embodied in these zones, the potential to explode and implode at any time was inscribed to their very existence. Therefore, they are powerful as they show a potential for a change.

Notes Very small adjustments have been made to the text Occupying the Occupied: Perceptions of Occupation and Control in Cyprus, to account for the seven years from its first publication in www.ibraaz.org, May 2, 2012, edited by Anthony Downey. 2 Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear, trans. Ames Hodges and Bertrand Richard (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012), 14. 3 See http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/occupy (accessed July 18, 2011). 4 On November 15, 2011, Al Jazeera Television covered the story of Occupy Buffer Zone and interviewed Cypriot activist Mihalis Eleftheriou and Rahme Veziroglu, a Turkish Cypriot sociologist and activist. During this interview, Veziroglu stated that “the word occupation is loaded with a lot of meanings for Cypriots. For the people living in the south, occupation refers to the North altogether. For some Turkish Cypriots, it means the military presence on the island. And then, there is also the ongoing occupy protest. When we combine them altogether, occupying the buffer zone which is occupied by the UN is pretty meaningful.” 5 In 1878, Britain took over the government of Cyprus as a protectorate from the Ottoman Empire as a result of the Cyprus Convention. In 1914, at the beginning of the First World War, Cyprus was annexed by the British. In 1925, following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Cyprus was made a Crown Colony. Between 1955 and 1959, EOKA was created by Greek Cypriots and led by George Grivas to perform enosis (union of the island with Greece). However, the EOKA campaign did not result in a union with Greece, but rather in an independent republic, The Republic of Cyprus, in 1960. In 1960, the mostly Muslim Turkish Cypriots made up only 18 percent of the Cypriot population. However, the 1960 constitution carried important safeguards for the participation of Turkish Cypriots in state affairs, such as the vice president being Turkish Cypriot, and 30 percent of parliament being Turkish Cypriot. One of the articles in the constitution was the creation of separate local municipalities, so that Greek and Turkish Cypriots could manage their own municipalities in big towns. This article of the constitution was never implemented by the Republic and President Archbishop. Internal conflicts turned into an armed battle between the two communities on the island, which prompted the United Nations to send peacekeeping forces in 1964 and these forces are still in place today. In 1974, Greek Cypriots performed a military coup with the support of the military junta in Greece and took control of the whole island. In response, Turkey sent its military to the island based on its rights as a guarantor state as per the 1959 Zurich Agreement. The military junta was defeated and the constitution restored but the Turkish military did not leave the island and seized the northern third of the island, prompting Turkish Cypriots in the south to flee to the north and Greek Cypriots in the north to flee to the south. The de facto state of Northern Cyprus was proclaimed in 1975 under the name of “The Turkish Federated State of Cyprus.” The 1

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name was changed to its present form on the November 15, 1983. The only country to formally recognize “The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” is Turkey. In 2002, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan started a new round of negotiations for the unification of the island. In 2003, the UN-controlled demarcation line known as the “Green Line” was partially opened by the North Cypriot authorities. The Republic of Cyprus allowed passage across the part of Nicosia it controls (as well as a few other selected crossing points), since the TRNC does not require a visa or leave entry stamps for such visits. In 2004, after long negotiations with both sides, a plan for unification of the island emerged. The resulting plan was supported by the UN, EU, and the United States. The nationalists on both sides campaigned for the rejection of the plan but it was accepted by the Turkish side while the Greek side rejected it. In 2008, the president of the Republic of Cyprus and leader of the Greek Cypriot community, and the Turkish Cypriot leader, agreed to restart negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations Secretary General. This information was extracted and quoted by merging two online sources: http://www.uncyprustalks.org and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Cyprus 6 Andreas Sophocleous, An Introduction to the History and Geography of Cyprus (Nicosia: Nicocles Publishing House, 1997). 7 Gail Ruth Hook, Britons in Cyprus, 1878–1914 (PhD diss., The University of Texas at Austin, 2009), http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/8381 8 See “The Project,” UNCOVERED, Cyprus: https://basaksenova.com/uncovered-2/, https://basaksenova.com/uncovered_exhibition/, and https://basaksenova.com/ uncovered/ 9 The UNCOVERED project was initiated in 2010, based on Cypriot artist Vicky Pericleous’s idea for an artistic intervention at Nicosia International Airport. Accordingly, in order to realize her idea, Pericleous worked on a project application and approached Özgül Ezgin (a Turkish Cypriot cultural manager, programmer, and artist) and Argyro Toumazou (a Greek Cypriot cultural manager and curator), who work on contract bases for the UN Goods Office. The UN Goods Office has been commissioning them to provide artworks for the conference room in which the peace talks have been taking place since 2009. Subsequently, her application was submitted as a proposal to the UNDP-ACT by Ezgin and Toumazou in parallel with the peace-negotiations process. Following the initial state with the UN, two curators, Pavlina Paraskevaidou and myself were asked to collaborate and develop a project for 2011. After working intensely together for about six months, we developed a longterm research-based art and media project that considers the UN initiation and the collaboration for 2011 as one of the segments of the project. Accordingly, the scale, the scope, and the structure of the project have been dramatically changed with the curatorial input. The project was designed to have two phases in the span of three years (2010–12). The first phase has concentrated on cultural production in Cyprus and the commissioning of eight projects by Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, including Özge Ertanın and Oya Silbery, Görkem Müniroglu and Emre Yazgin, Vicky Pericleous, Erhan Öze, Andreas Savva, Zehra Sonya and Gürgenc Kormazel, Socratis Socratous, Demetris Taliotis, Constantinos Taliotis and Orestis Lambrou. The exhibition of the projects ran from September 23 to October 23, 2011, followed by a guided tour of the exhibition given by the curators and a panel discussion in the afternoon with Monica Griznic, Lamia Joreige, Niyazi Kizilyurek, Socrates Stratis, and Jack Persekian, moderated by Basak Senova and Pavlina Paraskevaidou, and

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a screening of Anton Vidokle’s New York Conversations. An accompanying book was published in November that year, including contributions by Stavros Stavrides, Bulent Diken, Alex Galloway, Abdoumaliq Simone, Jalal Touffic, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Dervis Zaim, Mushon Zer-Aviv, Pelin Tan, and Socrates Stratis, together with essays from the curators and sections devoted to the archive and the artists’ work. The second phase gives priority to the commissioning and presentation of international art projects and publications under the auspices of UNCOVERED, both in Cyprus and abroad. We have presented the project in various different geographies with talks, presentations, and publications, and consequently managed to build bridges with some international institutions, artists, and curators that would like to participate in the project. Therefore, with the second phase, the project links and compares communication patterns in different geographical regions and analyses and compares parallel situations across borders, by taking diverse political, economical, social, and cultural backgrounds into account. 10 In other words, I am not simply from another country, I am specifically from one of the countries that happen to be a main actor in the conflict. I am considered to be one of the main occupiers. Please refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyprus_dispute 11 See http://occupythebufferzone.wordpress.com 12 A day before the first exhibition opening of UNCOVERED, which was realized “under the auspices of the UN” in September 2011, the exhibition was visited by UN executives, and Erhan Öze’s work—which investigates the war of sovereignty over Cyprus via an electromagnetic field and the island’s air space—was censored, along with the interviews with the islanders conducted by the artists in the “archive” section. The explanation for this was the usage of the word “Ercan” (the airport situated approximately 15 minutes from Nicosia but not internationally recognized as a port of entry). However, the project by Erhan Öze and the interviews were not promoting the airport; as the website of the project states: “Öze investigates how the war of sovereignty over Cyprus has been extended to the electromagnetic field and the island’s airspace. Oze highlights the tactic of intercepting radio signals as both Ercan Air Control Centre and Nicosia Air Control Centre try to exercise control over the FIR space and ascertain sovereignty. While he maps the airmisses over Cyprus’ air space, he also presents interviews with air traffic controllers from both sides where each presents their side of the problem.” It was an unexpected act and a shock for us as the entire content was sent to the UN Goods Office in July 2011 and confirmed following the transfer of the first installment of the money allocated to the exhibition. Although the UN executives were quite sensitive not to call this action “censorship” but rather a routine application of the UN regulations, the entire process and the logic of its operation clearly uncovered how the island is being controlled on multiple levels. 13 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Buffer_Zone 14 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995). 15 Stavros Stavrides, “Public Space as Commons,” in UNCOVERED Nicosia International Airport Book 1, ed. Basak Senova and Pavlina Paraskevaidou (Nicosia: Phileleftheros Publishing Group, 2011), 13. 16 Ibid. 17 As a note, since November 2011, the protestors have been squatting in the building that the UNCOVERED exhibition took place in April 2012, six activists were

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arrested in the buffer zone by anti-riot police and were taken to police headquarters for questioning. In the same incident, a British activist injured himself by jumping from the second floor of the building. He was transferred to a hospital. “‘Occupy Buffer Zone,’” Cyprus News Report, April 7, 2012, http://www.cyprusnewsreport. com/?q=node/5580 18 See http://occupythebufferzone.wordpress.com 19 See http://www.radio.occupybufferzone.info 20 See http://www.facebook.com/OccupyBufferZone 21 Saskia Sassen, “The Global Street Comes to Wall Street,” Possible Futures: A Project of the Social Science Research Council, November 22, 2011, http://www.possible-futures. org/2011/11/22/the-global-street-comes-to-wall-street/. 22 Stavros Stavrides, Open Space Appropriations and Potentialities of a “City of Thresholds,” in Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale, ed. Patrick Barron, and Manuela Mariani (Routledge NY and London, 2014), 48. 23 As to give few examples: the project was covered in “In the Bufferzone,” article by Christopher Lord. Brownbook: An Urban Guide to the Middle East. (UAE), No. 27, May–June 2011, pp. 68–73; “L’aeroporto di Nessuno,” article by Francesca Bonazzoli, Urban (Italy), No. 99, September 9, 2011, pp. 26–9; on April 10, 2011, Politis, “Pavlina Paraskevaidou/Basak Senova: Paradoxical Boarding” interview by Christina Lambrou; on June 9, 2011, Zaman newspaper and Arkitera online architectural portal, “Art Flights start at the Ghost Airport” by Jülide Karahan; on September 18, 2011, Phileleftheros newspaper, “Art ‘Flights’ at Nicosia International Airport,” by Elena Parpa; on October 21, 2011, Radikal newspaper, “Art in the bufferzone” by Elif Ekinci; on October 23, 2011, Yeni Düzen newspaper, “On Uncovered Exhibition” by Sonya; Daleel Madani (https://www.daleel-madani.org/civil-society-directory/ umam-documentation-research/events/uncovered-talk-basak-senova/projects); Photography and Cyprus: Time, Place and Identity , ed. Liz Wells, Theopisti StylianouLambert & Nicos Philippou (I.B. Tauris, 2014). Or to give some examples for the presentations and talks: The curatorial work of the UNCO VERED project was presented and discussed by Basak Senova during the Sharjah Art Foundation’s fourth Annual March Meeting, Sharjah, March 13, 2011; UNCOVERED presentation by Pavlina Paraskevaidou, during “Critical Archaeologies workshop” in the context of the project Suspended Spaces, Nicosia, April 8, 2011; UNCOVERED presentation by Basak Senova at UF AT, Uludag University, Bursa, April 30, 2011; pek Denizli Karagöz in conversation with Basak Senova and Özgul Ezgin on UNCOVERED projection Radio Programme, Bayrak Radio and Television (BRT), Nicosia, November 26, 2011, 13:00–13:45; and Galia Kraychovska in conversation with Basak Senova on UNCOVERED project on Bulgarian National Television (BNT), Sofia, November 17, 2011, 8:50 am–9:10 am. 24 As described on the website of Confrontation through Art, EMAA is a non-profit association which aims to gather people under the unifying and enriching framework of contemporary art. The association was founded as a result of a need to address issues and gaps in the world of art and culture in Cyprus. They respond to this need through our various projects and activities. Rooftop Theatre is a non-profit organization formed by a group of theatre professionals and theatre enthusiasts, from both major ethnic communities in Cyprus, who come together with the goal of discovering themselves and their land through the living art of theatre. http://www. art-confrontation.com/about-emaa-rooftop-theater

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25 Extracted from website of Confrontation through Art, http://www.art-confrontation. com 26 All the artists and the curators of this project were Europeans with the exception of my involvement, as I am a Turkish curator and Turkey is non-European country. Hence, I co-conducted the workshop and co-curated the exhibition with Alenka Gregoric, who is a Slovenian curator. 27 In this case of Confrontation through Art, the third international party was the European Union, where as for the UNCOVERED project, it was the UN Goods Office. 28 Giorgos Kokkinos discusses the importance of teaching history from multiple perspectives in his article “The Future of the Past: Why history Education Matters” dated in 2011 in History Education in Relation to the Controversial Past and Trauma edited by Lukas Perikleous and Denis Shemilt, published by the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research. I see a parallel tendency with the approach of the Confrontation through Art project. 29 Extracted from website of Confrontation through Art, http://www.art-confrontation. com 30 Andrew Boyd and David Oswald Mitchell, Beautiful Trouble. A Toolbox for Revolution (New York: OR Books, 2012), 270. 31 T.A.Z. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (New York: Autonomedia, 2003), 110. 32 The participating artists were Tuhkanen Timo, Benji Boyadgian, Nika Autor, Ovidiu Anton, Christina Georgiou, Nurtane Karagil, Abdullah Denizhan, and Marinos Houtris. 33 The documentation of the performance was shown in a group exhibition entitled “Line” that I curated at Art Rooms, Kyrenia in 2015. This quote was extracted from its publication. 34 Stavros Stavrides, “Open Space Appropriations and Potentialities of a ‘City of Thresholds’,” in Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale, ed. Patrick Barron and Manuela Mariani (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 54. 35 The occupied building at the buffer zone was lent to UNCOVERED project for the duration of the exhibition by the Metropolitanate of Kykkos few months before the occupation.

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Conflict Transformation Art in Nicosia: Engaging Social Groups across the Divided City through Artistic Practices Evanthia Tselika

Conflict transforms how urban and rural spaces are used and interpreted. In recent years, there has been a particular focus on precisely how such conflict, whether religious, ethnic, or national, has shaped European and Middle Eastern cities, and how such cities divide, absorb, resist, and potentially play a role in reconsidering territorial and social conflict.1 Partitioned urban settings, such as the ethno-nationally divided cities of Nicosia, Jerusalem, Belfast, and Mostar, are often marked by ethnic conflict and identity politics, which are subsequently reflected in how the built environment is negotiated. Writing about Jerusalem, Philip Misselwitz and Tim Rieniets introduced the idea/term “conflict urbanism” to describe “the relationship between political violence and the production of urban space.”2 This is the definition used in the present analysis in relation to Nicosia, where barbed wire and division blocks were set up by the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping force during the intercommunal fighting of the early 1960s. This was dubbed the “Green Line”—the demarcation line that witnessed two rounds of military fighting—that took its present form in 1974 to become the dividing ground that separates the entire island, and more iconically, present-day Nicosia. In the context of the ethno-nationally divided city of Nicosia, visual art practices have been used as a tool for conflict transformation and a means to cultivate cultural exchange, empathy, and dialogue. The text that follows examines such functions through the lens of contemporary art theory and especially its social, ethical, dialogical, community, and critical dimensions. A further area of focus is how artistic practices have developed in relation to the theorization of socially engaged/participatory practices and been used in conflict transformation processes. Overlaps between socially engaged art practices and the use of the arts in conflict resolution processes are discussed through the notion of conflict transformation art.3 The focus shifts to the 1990s and 2000s, when the contemporary art scene saw experience-based artistic endeavors coming to the fore. This coincided with a rapid growth in new theory and

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also socially engaged and peace-building artistic practices, both insinuating such art practice’s transformation into a cultural product. In this chapter, I present four case studies that illustrate the development of what I call conflict transformation art in Cyprus, and I examine how they relate to contemporary readings of artistic practices. The projects were carried out between 1992 and 2006 (Off Limits; the Gotland meeting; Leaps of Faith; Manifesta 6), which represents a time period when the island shifted from complete ethnic segregation to limited freedom of movement via controlled border crossings. I discuss how art practice functioned within the context of conflict transformation in Cyprus, and how it shifted from a peace-building practice focused on building trust among the communities and breaking down ethno-national stereotypes, to an internationally funded local cultural product that reflects the social and political trends of contemporary art practices. The projects are considered in terms of their relationship to conflict transformation vis-àvis the arts,4 and in relation to key readings in contemporary social art practice theory.5 This frames my argument of how conflict transformation art has developed in Cyprus in dialogue with contemporary art shifts, and how this in turn relates to a wider debate that uses political theory to analyze visual art. My reading of these cases through the lens of conflict transformation art greatly owes to political theorist John Paul Lederach and his interpretation of the concept of conflict transformation as a way to engage in constructive efforts toward change beyond resolving specific problems.6 Lederach argues that conflict is a constant factor in human relationships; as such, it cannot be resolved; rather, it must be transformed. He theorizes shifting from the idea of a linear timeline and a specific moment of agreement or concrete solutions, to the idea of “ongoing social and relational spaces, in other words, people in relationship[s] who generate responsive initiatives for constructive change.”7

Art, Conflict, and Antagonism: Conflict Transformation and the Art of Engagement in Cyprus As art has become increasingly integrated into peace-building and social change initiatives, it has also expanded beyond political, social, and peace-building narratives, leading to a rise in conflict-related visual art narratives and inquiries. Michaela Crimmin, co-director of Culture + Conflict, a UK organization that collaborates with institutions such as the Royal Academy of Arts and the art journal Frieze, believes that we are saturated, appalled, disappointed, and anaesthetized by the spectacles of war, xenophobia, failed interventions, feelings of individual impotence, and being “sidetracked by the daily exigencies of our own lives.” She further wonders “why, in the 21st century, there are so many people kept busy as the proponents, the victims and the profiteers of war.”8 The profiteering from war in times of digital connectivities and commonalities has been an increasing matter of concern within the auspices of the contemporary art world.9 Over the last thirty years, peace-building art has rejected the pictorial form of antiwar/peace art imagery that merely depicts the desolation, misery, and horrors brought

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on by conflict, instead favoring social contact and engagement. Peace-building now aims for transcendence, an element Johan Galtung, the founder of peace-building and conflict resolution studies, highlights as inherent in the arts. Galtung also relates peacebuilding to creativity, which he believes “is located in the borderland between the intellectual and the emotional,” enabling knowledge and emotions to together facilitate “transcendence, just as it happens to creative people in the arts.”10 Conflict resolution analyst Craig Zelizer believes that the arts are particularly important in conflict resolution work, specifically in raising “awareness of the dangers of impending conflict and speak out in favour of peace.”11 Through his research in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Zelizer highlights how artistic practice can challenge prejudices and create bridges between communities in conflict. Art is a tool of engagement in conflict transformation; it can bring segregated communities together and build relationships. This includes a broad range of artistic methods, including performance, sound, mural making, creative writing, painting, and sculpture. Each art method/practice can aid in different ways and at different stages of the conflict.12 Key to the process is art’s ability to promote and facilitate collaboration, without which social bonds and relationships cannot be built. The 1990s saw an increase in the use of the arts in a conflict resolution context.13 In Cyprus at the time, the phenomenon was part of a wider change in the peace-building market, when the focus shifted from political leaders to the community; grassroots level efforts used a variety of tactics of contact to facilitate conflict transformation. Going into the 2000s, Cyprus saw a boom in bicommunal art, which was funded almost exclusively by international organizations. A bicommunal art framework implies the active participation and collaboration of Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots in artistic production. Today the term “bicommunal” is fading, but its roots in the urban space can be traced to the Nicosia Master Plan (NMP) developed in 1979, following the successful implementation of a common sewage system for both sides in 1978. Led by the then mayors of the two sectors of Nicosia, Lellos Demetriades and Mustafa Akinci, the two administrations collaborated under the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).14 That said, bicommunal projects began to properly take off in February 1995, with training programs organized in the Buffer Zone aimed at developing a system of collective action for future peace-building activities in Cyprus, as well as activities to support this process.15 These activities included “special exhibitions” that featured “art, photography, and other works by individuals in both communities,” and even though they did not “bring together large numbers of people,” they did serve “as important symbols of peaceful co-existence.”16 In 1998, UNDP-ACT was launched under the Bi-Communal Development Program, funded by USAID and the UNDP.17 This peace-building program sought to build intercommunal confidence and assist in reconciliation and reunification via projects benefiting both Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots.18 Between 1998 and 2004, the program used over $60 million in USAID funding for bicommunal projects,19 a budget that was increased in 2002 for culture and art projects.20 In 2014, when I interviewed Argyro Toumazou21 on visual artists collaborating across the divide following the lifting of restrictions on movement in 2003, she indicated that the “social element, the element of encounter was stronger than the aesthetic

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development aspect at the start.”22 Speaking as an art manager, and as someone who had produced many contemporary art programs related to conflict transformation, she described an inter-personal process of social change. Firstly, at the human level. Usually I develop programs for groups and people do come together, even though as Cypriots we are not characterized by collective action in the public space. Sometimes we take people abroad and to large-scale exhibition events and we manage to involve individuals who are not positive towards peace-building and have quite a hard-line ethnical stance, and you see people changing slowly one by one. You do not win everyone but the change happens.23

Recently, the rise in artistic production that transcends/ignores the divide has coincided with efforts to understand the development of art across, within and about the Buffer Zone. Haris Pellapaisiotis examines what he terms “the art of the buffer zone” through analyzing four curator-led projects24 that used the Buffer Zone as a site for art.25 Pellapaisiotis also instigated Off Limits, the first project and case study I explore.

Off Limits, 1992 Off Limits was a photographic project conceived, organized, and produced by GreekCypriot Haris Pellapaisiotis (see Figure 13.1), with the participation of Turkish-Cypriot photographer Ilkay Mehmet. Both residing in London at the time, Pellapaisiotis commissioned Mehmet to find another Turkish-Cypriot to participate in the project, while he did the same regarding another Greek-Cypriot. The project, which was realized in 1992, was to be hosted by the UN at the Ledra Palace Hotel on the occasion of that year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. With cross-border movement in Cyprus heavily restricted at the time, intercommunal meetings were strictly UN-facilitated. Pellapaisiotis traces collaboration in the arts between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots living in London back to the late 1970s and early 1980s. He attributes his involvement with the London Cypriot community to his wider interest and participation in the social documentary photography movement that was then prevalent in the UK. He established Axis Photo-Coop, the first non-profit art-related organization for Cypriots in London, and it was through this endeavor that multiple initiatives were launched, including Off Limits, the first joint Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot-organized photographic exhibition in Cyprus, following the 1974 division of the island.26 The community relationships cultivated in London between Greek and Turkish Cypriots were in part nurtured by a wider community art movement then occurring in London. Central to the understanding of the community art movement is Rufus Harris 1972 report, Community Arts in Great Britain. As part of his research, he organized a two-day seminar that birthed the Association of Community Artists and shaped a socially focused practice in the cultural landscape of a postcolonial metropolis.27 Pellapaisiotis directly links Off Limits to the influence of the community

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Figure 13.1  Haris Pellapaisiotis, Photograph. Presented in the Off Limits exhibition, 1992. Image courtesy of the artist.

art movement, which enjoyed the support of the Greater London Council, noting that no such intercommunity initiatives in relation to the visual arts were happening at the time in Cyprus, except for Panicos Chrysanthou’s filmic endeavors.28 Journalist and photographer Georges Der Parthogh wrote that Off Limits as an “exhibition is the first of its kind” as it addressed “what is beyond the line in all its stark reality.”29 The two London-based photographers invited Greek-Cypriot Antigone Drousiotou and Turkish-Cypriot Kadir Kaba; the two contributors lived in Cyprus, and so the exhibition offered photographs from both sides of the divide. As Pellapaisiotis pointed out at the time: “after eighteen years of separation the picture of both sides has become murky, both because of propaganda and by not having access.”30 Ledra Palace

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Hotel was “chosen on the basis of its neutrality and practicality, as it could be accessed by people from both sides of the divide.”31 Ultimately however, the exhibition was not presented at the Ledra Palace Hotel, as the Turkish-Cypriot authorities pulled out as hosts with little warning; at the time, the UN required both sides’ permission to host bicommunal activities.32 The exhibition eventually launched south of the Buffer Zone, at the Cultural Centre of the Cyprus Popular Bank, and then traveled to Nuremberg, Germany, and the Orchard Gallery in Derry, Northern Ireland.33 At a point in time when intercommunal communication in Cyprus was extremely challenging, the failure to jointly mount the exhibition highlighted the lack of visual exposure and inter-personal contact between the communities. It was London, as an intermediate shared space, that enabled the contact and relationships that shaped and drove the endeavor. The idea of contact zones as shared spaces and sites of encounter has been central to the development of conflict transformation tactics, as well as to understanding how artists work with communities they belong to. Discussing community art and its relationship to the state, Owen Kelly writes that, as a movement, it “allowed itself to be fashioned by its desire to seek funding and by its willingness to ignore the price that was exacted for that funding—in the form of a progressive loss of control over the direction of the movement.”34 This is not unrelated to the criticisms levelled at the role of international funding in bicommunal art. Following his experience in Off Limits, Pellapaisiotis decided that he would no longer participate in producing bicommunal art events, which at the time were largely carried out via mediating international bodies such as the UN. He felt that the positioning of the arts as mediator, particularly in an era of strict segregation, was not something he wanted to further pursue. As Off Limits was developed in a context of intense ethno-national propaganda, he remembers it was hard to talk about a unified Cyprus; in fact, dialogue was overly self-censored, restricting people from openly and truthfully expressing their positions.35 It was not until the mid-1990s that initiatives across the divide proliferated (via international support mechanisms), and art exchanges developed as a means for shaping shared contexts and encounters. The Gotland meeting, which is examined below, aimed to cultivate bicommunal relationships via the arts; it took place at the end of a decade in which training around peace-building was being supported by UN and USAID bicommunal initiatives in Cyprus, but movement restrictions were nevertheless still in place.

The Gotland Meeting between Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot Artists, 1999 In July 1999, a bicommunal meeting in Gotland, Sweden, hosted seventeen GreekCypriots and twelve Turkish-Cypriots from different cultural fields (visual arts, literature, theatre, and music) who participated in a week-long workshop that aimed to build relationships through creative interactions. The meeting was initiated by poets

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Niki Marangou and Neshe Yashin to promote contact, communication, and human connection on a personal level; the idea was to encourage sustainable bicommunal relationships at a time of firm division. Supported and funded by KLYS (the Swedish Joint Committee for Artistic and Literary Professionals), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the city of Gotland, the premise was that culture, free of borders, is an appropriate means to promote positive outcomes in areas of conflict. The Gotland meeting had three primary objectives: to enable artists from the two communities to work together, to promote positive intercommunal relationships, and for the artists to produce work that would be disseminated on both sides of the island.36 The objectives of this meeting are reflected in Craig Zelizer’s argument that “non-linear and creative methods of expression,” such as those used in the arts, can trigger communication and “alternative ways of interacting or expressing emotions and thoughts.”37 Because of the impossibility of meeting in Cyprus, reacquaintance, communication, and interaction were very important facets of this meeting. Kees Epskamp—a leading figure in the Theatre for Development movement, who has used UN cultural initiatives to work on global peace art projects—differentiates between art that can be used “as an end in itself,” and art that functions “as a means to achieve an additional goal.”38 In Gotland, art was clearly meant to provide the means to an additional goal: for Cypriot artists to interact and produce work together, with a view to assisting peace-building. Epskamp describes the process of producing art together as an “educational or therapeutic instrument.”39 And in fact, relationship-building was central to the Gotland meeting as it represented the first large-scale contact between

Figure 13.2  Emin Çizenel, The First Supper: One of You Will Not Betray Me, 1999–2000. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot artists from different disciplines. A strong cathartic aspect also emerged from the meeting. One of the participants at Gotland was Emin Çizenel, a Turkish-Cypriot visual artist. In the context of the bicommunal gathering Çizenel presented a series of twelve paintings entitled, The First Supper: One of You Will Not Betray Me (see Figure 13.2).40 The work shows an ecumenical gathering related to the ritual of the twelve apostles whose feet Jesus washed, and the artist encourages viewers to reflect on their own experience in these twelve anonymous portraits: “if you hide your shame from yourself your feet will betray you and your bare feet will become the symbol of an unending walk.”41 The Christian imagery in the paintings raises many questions and suggests various interpretations: this is not the well-known Last Supper, but a first one, intimating perhaps that this first meeting (in Gotland) may be the beginning of ongoing contact. Çizenel’s use of a Christian parable reveals his trust and hope, as he connects through the spiritual beliefs of the presumed “other.” Alluding to the washing of the feet a process of humbling is implied, one that is observed in cases of encounter across sustained segregation where the other becomes the imagined enemy. Both this work by Çizenel and the direct physical contact and exchange that took place over that one week in Gotland open the door to thinking of empathy in relation to the arts, an idea central to peace-building and interpreted by art and cultural historians as a key feature of contemporary practices. Art historian Alison Landsberg looks at empathy through the lens of “prosthetic memory,”42 noting that the word itself does not appear in the English language until the beginning of the twentieth century.43 She distinguishes it from sympathy; empathy “starts from the position of difference,” and enables us to enter an experience outside of ourselves, which can help to build a relationship, a connection, which “recognizes the alterity of identification.” Jill Bennett also writes from an art history perspective when she examines artistic practices that demonstrate “certain conjunctions of affective and critical operations” that “might constitute the basis of something we can call empathetic vision.”44 This empathetic “insight” is echoed in Grant Kester’s work as a “necessary component of a dialogical aesthetic.”45 The ability to imagine another subject’s position can “alter our sense of who we are,” leading to an empathetic insight, which then “become[s] the basis for communication and understanding across differences of race, sexuality, ethnicity and so on.”46 Cultivating empathy, relationships, and contact were focal points of the Gotland meeting in 1999. Leaps of Faith, on the other hand, which is discussed next, made the geographical place of the Buffer Zone (spatialization of conflict) its focus, as both site and subject. This project is also considered the first international contemporary art event in the public space of Nicosia, which intervened in the ruptured inner city center and came into direct conversation with the socio-political art trends of the time.

Leaps of Faith, 2005 In May 2005, not long after cross-border movement was eased (April 2003), the exhibition Leaps of Faith was held in Nicosia in and around the Buffer Zone and in selected public spaces and sites on both sides of the city. The intention was to trigger an

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alternative dialogue, one detached from the political lens through which the Cypriot situation was most commonly presented.47 The exhibition was initiated by Rana Cinzir and curated by Katerina Gregou and Erden Kosova—respectively, a Greek and a Turkish art historian—who invited twenty-two artists to take part in the exhibition, including Cypriot artists from both sides of the divide, as well as internationally acclaimed artists such as Sejla Kameric, Akram Zaatari, and Dan Perjovschi.48 It was the first time that permission was granted for a section of the Buffer Zone to be utilized to host an international art event, and the first time that an international exhibition took place in the public spaces on both sides of the Green Line. Projects were presented in empty parking lots, near the military barriers and in vacant or abandoned shops; they explored matters such as the divided landscape, gender and racial issues, economic and physical exploitation of immigrant labor, and the uncontrolled development in the south of the island. Leaps of Faith aimed expressly to scrutinize the geographical particulars of the island, including its location between three continents, a zone characterized by ongoing political friction. Most works/projects were site-specific and were created through on-site research in communication with area residents in the brief time period that the artists stayed in the city. Concentrating on the function of art as an instigator of communication, this exhibition also heralded the arrival of a new genre of public art practice and language in the Cypriot art-scape. This international art event presented a clear-cut transition in the use of art within a conflict resolution mechanism, as it created ties with global art directions. Despite the fact that there was a legacy of culture as a tool for peace-building in Cyprus, it still represented a particular shift in how peace-building funding was utilized to enable contemporary artistic production. One of the curators, Erden Kosova points out that one of the exhibition’s main objectives was to facilitate and promote circulation between the Greek and Turkish parts of the city; at the very least, to get people to walk across the check point crossings, to go back and forth.49 And yet, while the organizers had highlighted the division and encouraged the public to navigate and rethink the charged space of the city, few works ultimately directly involved the general public actively in dialogue around the new experience of being able to cross the buffer zone after twenty-nine years. Call#192, however, that I go on to discuss was one of the projects presented as part of Leaps of faith, which was shaped through the responses of the participants. Call#192 was a collaboration between AA + U—an agency founded by Socrates Stratis and Maria Loizidou—and Haris Pellapaisiotis. Their project research involved looking for commonalities across the divide and their investigations revealed that the telephone information number 192 was still used on both sides of the island. Considering the idea that the common is found in small details and not major ideological patterns, they decided on the idea of a parallel bus route.50 The group identified two bus routes, one on each side of the Buffer Zone, and proposed these as a kind of mirror trip, where people would take the bus route on the opposite side of their home, in the company of a member of the artistic team. Participants were asked to make maps, sketches, photos, drawings, which together with their recorded conversations documented the participants’ mental maps of the space during and after the trip. Each member of the Call#192 team approached these cartographies through

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Figure 13.3  Participant response maps to the Call#192 bus rides. Leaps of Faith, Nicosia 2005 Collaboration: AA + U (Socrates Stratis—Maria Loizidou) and Haris Pellapaisiotis. Image credit: David Officer and Haris Pellapaisiotis, Thinking the City, 2006, p. 54.

their own lens. They were ultimately exhibited in a structure that included the two buses and which was placed in the Buffer Zone, at the Ledra Palace Hotel crossing.51 A selection of these “mappings,” together with contributions from artists and various writers, were compiled in Thinking the city, published in 2006 by David Officer and Haris Pellapaisiotis (see Figure 13.3). Call#192 directly involved the participants, allowing for an interpretation through a broader dialogical art lens; as a result, allowing for the correlation with a new art genre of public art narrative. Pellapaisiotis collaborated with renowned Cypriot anthropologist Peter Loizos as part of this process, as they took the first bus ride together and recorded their verbal exchange in Thinking the City, the above-mentioned independent publication. Loizos is quoted in the transcribed notes: The hope is that no matter how deadlocked things are at the leadership level, there will always be more and more small things happening which are about normalizing relationships between human beings who have been divided by other human beings.52

What Loizos is noting here is the importance of cultivating interpersonal relationships and the significance of small actions between human beings, which parallels political theorist Costas M. Constantinou’s argument for “social, legal, artistic, intellectual tactics: tactics that unsettle ethnic reification and bring forth historical insight as to the contingency of identity.”53 Constantinou believes such tactics can address issues of prescribed identity as well as enable the imagining of transgression through a dialogical process outside the leadership level that focuses on contact between people. In the team’s dialogical process, and in Pellapaisiotis’s reiteration through the publication format, we find evidence of what Kester described as a “dialogical” or a

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“discursive” practice of art.54 Conversation is positioned as an “integral part of the work itself ” and is “reframed as an active, generative process.”55 I see a further instance of the dialogical in the way that Leaps of Faith initiated a conversation between global political art practices and art as a tool of conflict transformation in Cyprus. It used the local framework of conflict transformation art practices and the landscape of the charged and divided city, but created direct links with contemporary art directions that connected art and politics. Unlike the artists’ meeting in Gotland, which engaged directly in building relationships, this project focused more on the facilitation of a bicommunal exchange in the international context of a city-based exhibition. Being the island’s first international art project directly related to conflicted landscape of the city, Leaps of Faith also acted as a warm-up event for Manifesta 6, which was to take place in Nicosia in 2006. I interpret it as a transitional step in the use of the arts in a peace-building context: it successfully triggered a dialogue between local patterns of conflict resolution and prominent contemporary international socio-political art directions. Artist Helene Black, right before Leaps of Faith took place, wrote in an Open Letter to Manifesta that “the race for the Green Line as a cultural commodity has begun.”56

Manifesta 6 (M6), 2006: The Biennial That Never Happened A race that was never concluded as the much-discussed Nicosia Manifesta biennial never happened. Manifesta 6 (M6)57 was intended to be an art school operating in both the north and south sectors of Nicosia for a period of three months, from September to December 2006. In early 2005, the International Foundation Manifesta (IFM) appointed the curatorial team—Mai Abu ElDahab, Florian Waldvogel, and Anton Vidokle—who came together for this project. Locally, M6 was administered by the Nicosia for Art Organisation (NfA),58 which fell under the umbrella of local governance bodies and was managed by the director of the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (NiMAC), Yiannis Toumazis. The M6 curators wanted to challenge the conventional large-scale exhibition format; they proposed a temporary art school that would have three departments, each revolving “around diverse cultural issues and debates, and each proposing a different structural model for art education.”59 The art school would involve a variety of cultural producers—writers, curators, visual artists, architects—with the aim of producing a series of site-specific works via both short- and long-term residencies.60 Using theoretical groundwork such as Ivan Illich’s 1971 Deschooling Society, and referring to experiments such as the Black Mountain College, founded in 1933 in North Carolina, the pedagogical format of the M6 school aimed to escape the confines of the biennialdriven, exhibition-focused art market. This choice was not unrelated to the absence, at the time, of a fine art school, a subject that has long been a matter of debate in Cyprus. This absence figured significantly in the M6 curators’ decision to stage Nicosia’s M6 as an art school, and it was the reason they proposed to create something that would be of value locally.61 M6 aimed to use a situational framework that would create a social context through an art school that would operate in the two sectors of the city. It was

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hoped that, through the three platforms of inter-disciplinary exchanges envisioned by the curators, the art school would act as a creative bridge in the polarized Nicosia landscape. The art school never materialized, however, because of disagreements over property use and space of location-an ongoing sore point in the Cyprus dispute. Katerina Pizanias argues that, even prior to the collapse of the M6, there had been mounting frustration among local art actors at what they felt was the exclusionary attitude of the international curators.62 But it was the curators’ decision to hold a major part of the art school in the northern sector of the city that was ultimately the reason the Nicosia M6 failed. Major funders from the Republic of Cyprus, including the government itself, the municipality of Nicosia, and the Cyprus Tourism Organization, were not happy with the limelight focused outside of the republic, into the Turkish Cypriot area.63 The curators were fired, the NfA sued the IFM, and the case ended up in the European courts. The failure of the IFM and the NfA to collaborate revealed the limitations of contemporary art systems in the face of ethno-national politics. This is echoed in a small booklet published in 2012 by Yiannis Toumazis, the director of the NfA and NiMAC, on the subject of the failed M6. In it, he discusses the “general impact of politics on art” and the role of the curator in a “globalized arena.”64 He particularly highlights the failure of the global art world to take into account local complexities and political issues. The failure and fallout from M6 were discussed at length in both the local and international press, as well as on the e-flux publishing platform and other post-mortem events.65 Claire Bishop stated that the cancellation of M6 in Nicosia signaled the moment of the educational turn in contemporary art.66 The failure of M6 to materialize was nothing new for Cypriots, who have been living for over fifty years in the temporal permanence of failed attempts to resolve what is referred to as the Cyprus Problem.67 The curators wrote an open letter straight after the collapse of the collaboration stating their position, that in “regards to the primary issue around the location of a part of the school in the north, the contractual agreement made with the local authorities clearly defined Manifesta 6 as a bi-communal project,” developed in a “spirit of bi-communality.”68 One must wonder, however, to what extent the curators studied the extant artistic frameworks of collaboration in the conflict transformation context such as Nicosia. While bicommunalism was positioned as a core aspect of the project, together with an open social and pedagogical format, the collapse of the temporary school ultimately resulted in a missed opportunity to see how the school would have functioned across the divide. Because of the many antagonisms that led to the collapse of M6, I want to relate this case to theories of antagonism and agonism as shaped by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their seminal 1985 book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.69 In their discussion of concepts such as radical democracy and agonism, they emphasize that social difference is an inherent part of democratic models, and the resultant antagonisms/conflicts are unavoidable and must be addressed, re-negotiated, and challenged. Antagonism is described as an element of oppositionality, which frames our understanding of difference and how collective identities are formed,70 and agonism is proposed as a philosophical tenet that accepts antagonism as an inherent part of political life, where limits are understood but connections are nevertheless

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developed across differences. Laclau and Mouffe’s seminal work, as well as Mouffe’s subsequent writings and the notions of antagonism/agonism, has become a central focus in reading the expansive and perplexing realm of participatory-social-civiccritical-activist art practices.71 Writing on antagonism and objectivity, Laclau and Mouffe indicate that rarely has anyone attempted “to address the core of our problem: what is an antagonistic relation? what type of relation among objects does it suppose?”72 Considering the specific format proposed by the M6 curators—in light of Cyprus’s political context—it is interesting to read their responses/reactions to the legal termination of the collaboration and the antagonistic relations it reveals. In an opinion piece in Frieze, El Dahab is quoted saying that “the current administrative structure of the Manifesta Foundation [needs to create] a more substantial and less superficial relationship with the political contexts in which it might take place.”73 In the same article, Waldvogel is quoted saying that in retrospect, it seems that “IFM, NfA and we, the curators, were naive to think that a project of this calibre can be realized within this political atmosphere” and “we need to rethink the idea of globalizing a Western approach to art.”74 Waldvogel’s statement points to a number of wider debates: on notions of center and periphery, on the exoticization of conflict, and on the limitations of art within contexts of military and political division. Vidokle wrote that his demoralizing confrontation with Cypriot governmental officials pushed him into operating in a more self-organized direction, and led him to finding “ways of doing things that do not involve complete reliance on existing institutions for audiences, funding or legitimacy.”75 The insights and dynamics of the pedagogical format proposed by the curatorial team for Nicosia, which never materialized, were largely debated and practiced in the schools shaped by Vidokle in Berlin, Mexico City, and New York. Unfortunately, we cannot know the manner in which the schools in Nicosia, in their “spirit of bi-communality,” might have related to the conflicted framework of the city and what type of movement would have been instigated across the buffer zone.76 We do know though that its failure to happen triggered the need for an analysis of how socially engaged practices have been integrated in conflict transformation initiatives, and raised questions as to the realpolitik dimension of art, the role of international political bodies/human rights organizationsin art funding, and the use of art in shaping activism and civic action.

Conclusion The four case studies examined here echo Chantal Mouffe’s argument that art and politics cannot be interpreted as two separate fields. This is observed both in the cases of art produced echoing more ethnocentric narratives in Cyprus and in the cases of art collaborations across the divide, as there is an inherent “aesthetic dimension in the political and there is a political dimension in art.”77 Today, we have a large body of research on art undertaken by political theorists; a growing use of political theory as a tool to analyze art; and a greater involvement of states, NGOs, and international bodies in shaping participatory, engaged, and activist art practices. The popularization of social art practices, through the support of public and community local funding

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mechanisms in the West, in parallel with the increase in the use of art to involve peoples within conflicted frameworks, as in the case of Cyprus, can be read not only as art’s need to be useful, but also as a testament to the increased embedding of art in local, regional, and international aid and social development programs. Even though it is problematic to assume that art practices alone can be used as a presumed glue to challenge political divisions, their increasing presence in developmental initiatives attests to their popularization as enablers for community actions, contexts of dialogues, and transformative potential. Surrounded as we are by wars, mass displacements, and social uprisings, to insist in developing communalities across imposed barriers through art, despite the obstacles, acts as a reminder of how human ecologies, connections, and networks permeate divisions and manifest notions of the commons.78

Notes James Calame and Esther Charlesworth, Divided Cities: Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar and Nicosia (Pensylvania: University of Pensylvania Press, 2009); “Conflict in Cities Organisation,” http://www.conflictincities.org (accessed September 4, 2018). 2 Phillip Misselwitz and Tim Rieniets, City of Collision: Jerusalem and the Principles of Conflict Urbanism (Basel, Boston, and Berlin: Birkhauser Publishers for Architecture, 2006), 22. 3 Conflict transformation, as encountered within political science, and the ways in which it relates to the social and critical turn of participatory art practices and their subsequent theorisation in connection with civic, ethical, and community responsibility, allowed me to explore artistic practices in Cyprus, which have involved both Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots through this prism of conflict transformation art. 4 Kees Epskamp, “Healing Divided Societies,” in People Building Peace: 35 Inspiring Stories from around the World (Utrecht: European Platform for Conflict Prevention, 1999); Johan Galtung, Transcend and Transform: An Introduction to Conflict Work (London, Sterling, and Virginia: Pluto Press, 2004); John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 5 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso Books, 2012; Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley, CA, and London: University of California Press, 2004); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy towards a Radical Democratic Politics Second Edition (London and New York: Verso Books, 2001); Chantal Mouffe, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1, no. 2 (2007), http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html (accessed September 4, 2019). 6 John Paul Lederach, The Little Book of Conflict Transformation (Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2003), 4. 7 Lederach, The Moral Imagination, 47. 8 Michaela Crimmin and Elizabeth Stanton, eds., Art and Conflict (London: Royal College of Art, 2014), 4. 9 The much awarded work of Forensic Architecture in the last few years, led by Eyal Weizmann attests to this, as they “undertake advanced spatial and media 1

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investigations into cases of human rights violations, with and on behalf of communities affected by political violence,” https://forensic-architecture.org/ (accessed September 4, 2019). 10 Galtung, Transcend and Transform, 160. 11 Craig Zelizer, “The Role of Artistic Processes in Peacebuilding in BosniaHerzegovina” (Doctoral diss., George Mason University, 2004), 4. 12 Craig Zelizer, “Integrating Community Arts and Conflict Resolution: Lessons and Challenges from the Field,” Community Art Network, http://wayback.archive-it. org/2077/20100906203351/ and http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/ archivefiles/2007/06/integrating_com.php (accessed September 4, 2018). 13 Zelizer, The Role of Artistic Processes, 6. 14 Agni Petridou, Nicosia Master Plan: A Bi-Communal Initiative to Change the Image of the City (Nicosia: Nicosia Municipality, 2001). 15 Benjamin J. Broome, Building Bridges across the Green Line: A Guide to Intercultural Communication in Cyprus (Nicosia: United Nations Development Programme, 2005), 25–6. 16 Ibid., 21. 17 Christopher Louise and Tabitha Morgan, Citizen Peacemakingin Cyprus: The Story of Co-operation and Trust across the Green Line (Nicosia: United Nations Development Programme, 2013), 11. 18 Richard Blue, Final Report: Cyprus Bi-communal Development Program Evaluation (Nicosia: United Nations Development Programme, 2004), iv. 19 Ibid., v. 20 Ibid., 22. 21 Toumazou is an independent producer-organizer of cultural events in Nicosia, particularly focused on artistic collaboration across the divide. 22 Argyro Toumazou,“Video Interview with Argyro Toumazou,” interview by the author on June 6, 2014, video, 58, Nicosia. 23 Ibid. 24 Leaps of Faith, 2005; Manifesta 6, 2006; Suspended Spaces, 2010–11; and Uncovered, 2011. 25 Haris Pellapaisiotis, “The Art of the Buffer Zone,” in Photography and Cyprus: Time, Place and Identity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 218. 26 Haris Pellapaisiotis, “Interview with Haris Pellapaisiotis,” interview by the author on July 6, 2017, Nicosia. 27 Owen Kelly, Community, Art, and the State: Storming the Citadels (Stroud: Comedia Publishing Group, 1984), 12. 28 Panicos Chrysanthou has produced films since the 1980s involving both Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot protagonists, highlighting issues around division, conflict, and the need for peace-building. One example is Our Wall, a film focusing on the history of ethnic division and the Buffer Zone. 29 George Der Parthogh, “View from Both Sides,” The Cyprus Weekly, March 20–26, 1992, 16. 30 Katy Turner, “Photographs from across the Divide,” Cyprus Mail, March 20, 1992, 10. 31 Ibid. 32 Pellapaisiotis, “The Art of the Buffer Zone,” 220. 33 Ibid. 34 Kelly, Community, Art, 25. 35 Pelapaissiotis interview, 2017.

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36 Klys Cyprus. Historic Meeting of Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot Artists in Gotland, 1999, http://www.klys.se/cyprus/ (accessed December 5, 2014). 37 Craig Zelizer, “The Role of Artistic Processes in Peacebuilding in BosniaHerzegovina,” Peace and Conflict Studies 10, no. 2, article 4 (2003): 63. 38 Epskamp, “Healing Divided Societies,” 287. 39 Ibid. 40 Emin Cizenel Artist statement of The First Supper, 2000 artwork. Sent by the artist in personal communication with the author. July 2017. 41 Emin Cizenel, personal communication with the author around The First Supper artwork, July 2017. 42 Landsberg negotiates the way mass culture technology creates collective memories, as it enables us to remotely witness historical events as they are happening. 43 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory. The Transformation of American Remembrance in The Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 135. 44 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision. Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 21. 45 Kester, Conversation Pieces, 115. 46 Ibid. 47 Rana Zincir, Leaps of Faith Exhibition Catalogue (Istanbul: Kolektif, 2005). 48 Ibid. 49 Suzana Milevska, “In Conversation with Erden Kosova,” Periphery-Resistant-Different Registers of Engagements with Reality, 2005, http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text. php?textid=1358&lang=en, accessed and downloaded June 4, 2013 [broken link now]. 50 Pelapaissiotis interview, 2017. 51 Ibid. 52 David Officer and Haris Pelapaissiotis, eds., Thinking the City (Nicosia: Mediterranean Voices and Inter college, 2007), 57. 53 Costas Constantinou, “Aporias of Identity: Bicommunalism, Hybridity and the Cyprus Problem,” Cooperation and Conflict 42 (September 2007): 247–70. 54 Kester, Conversation Pieces, 9. 55 Ibid., 8. 56 Helene Black, “The Race for the Green Line as a Cultural Commodity Has Begun,” NeMe, February 2005, http://www.neme.org/blog/open-letter-to-manifesta (accessed September 4, 2019). 57 Manifesta is a European biennial that changes location every two years. It was first held in Rotterdam in 1996 aiming to facilitate cultural exchange within a post-Iron Curtain Europe. 58 The Nicosia for Art Organisation was set up to administer and manage the Nicosia Manifesta, in collaboration with the International Foundation Manifesta. 59 M6 curators, “Letter from Former Curators of Manifesta 6,” e-flux, June 6, 2006, http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/letter-from-former-curators-of-manifesta-6/ (accessed September 4, 2018). 60 Foundation European Art Manifestation, Nicosia This Week (Rotterdam: Veenman Publishers, 2006). 61 “Notes for an Art School,” Manifesta 6, 2006, https://zs.thulb.uni-jena.de/rsc/viewer/ jportal_derivate_00233001/Manifesta_mani6_509491480_0002.TIF (accessed September 4, 2019).

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62 Caterina Pizanias, “Manifesta 2006: When Art Met Politics,” paper presented at the 4th International Conference of the ESA Research Network Sociology for the Arts, Glasgow, 2007. 63 Ibid. 64 Yiannis Toumazis, Manifesta 6| The Case of the Cancelled Biennial (Nicosia: Nicosia Municipal Art Centre, 2012), 4. 65 One such event was the United Nations Plaza in Berlin organized by one of the curators, Anton Vidokle. United Nations Plaza was a temporary, experimental school set up in Berlin in 2006 after the cancellation of M6. Reiterations of the project also took place in Mexico City and New York. 66 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 241. 67 Ibid., 5. 68 M6 curators, “Letter from Former Curators of Manifesta 6.” 69 Laclau and Mouffe reflected on twentieth-century philosophical inquiries in relation to post-structuralist theory, psychoanalytic analysis, and linguistics for a critical reconsideration of Marxism in relation to pluralism within the democratic framework and forms of resistance by new social movements. 70 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, xiv. 71 The political theorists’ work has been considered in the above context by writers, central to the debates of public and participatory art and culture analysis such as Rosalyn Deutche, Claire Bishop, Grant Kester, and Markus Miessen. It is now a popular theme across books, articles, and MA and PhD theses related to visual art practices. 72 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 122. 73 “School’s Out,” opinion piece in Frieze, September 2, 2006, https://frieze.com/article/ school%E2%80%99s-out (accessed September 4, 2018). 74 Ibid. 75 Anton Vidokle, “Exhibition to School: unitednations plaza,” in Curating and the Educational Turn, ed. Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson (London: Open Editions, 2010), 148–56. 76 M6 curators, “Letter from Former Curators of Manifesta 6.” 77 Mouffe, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” 4. 78 Evanthia Tselika, “Introduction, Commoning Practices: Social Arts, Free Technologies and Maker Cultures,” in Unconference Proceedings Free/ LibreTechnologies, Arts and the Commons, ed. Evanthia Tselika and Niki Sioki (Nicosia: University of Nicosia Research Foundation, 2020), http://www.unrf.ac.cy/ files/unconference-proceedings-phygital.pdf (accessed April 10, 2020).

Index absolutism 23 activist intervention 10, 211 Adamopoulou, Areti 104 Adil, Alev 8, 155–6, 160–7, 169–71 agencies 6, 139, 151, 235 A.G. Leventis Foundation 120, 195 Akinci, Mustafa 49 n.18, 229 Akin, Oya 218, 219 Alternate, The 130 alternative 4, 6, 9, 17, 23, 29, 37, 42, 43, 46–8, 54, 94, 120, 125, 126, 129, 130, 132, 155, 156, 171, 173, 175, 182, 186, 193, 194, 206, 217, 235 Ammohostos 205 amnesia 9 Anan Plan 144 Annan, Kofi 222 n.5 antagonism 238–9 Antoniou, Klitsa 10, 193, 199–201 Aphrodite: Courtesan of the Word (Karayanni) 127–8 Aphrodite to Mary (Adil) 163 Apophasis Gallery 4, 6, 85–6, 91–9 Apotheke 121, 124–6, 132 archaeology 1, 7–9, 155–8, 163–9, 171, 173–4, 187 art and 8, 9, 158, 165, 171, 173–6, 186 classifications 181 dig 177–9 display 179–82 fragment 182–6 materialism and 176–7 Archaeology of Cyprus, The (Knapp) 175 Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, The (Foucault) 173 architecture 23, 140, 158 archival impulse (Foster) 182 archive 6, 9, 10, 38, 42, 134 n.4, 158, 160, 167, 172 n.14, 173, 174, 176, 180–2, 185, 223 n.12

Archive Fever (Derrida) 182 Argyrou, Vassos 22, 26, 28 “Arşiv Sanat” (Art Archive) 50 n.33 art 229 and archaeology 8, 9, 158, 165, 171, 173–6, 186 and art history 3–5, 29, 104 bicommunal 24, 34 n.49, 229, 232–4, 237, 238 Byzantine 19, 23, 25–8, 87, 140, 141, 196 Cypriot 7, 17–21, 24, 30, 54, 87, 104, 105 historiography 11, 18, 25, 26 production 3, 12, 54, 119, 216, 217 scene 1, 3–5, 11, 34 n.49, 41, 43, 54, 60, 61, 67, 70, 86, 91, 119–22, 124, 128, 132, 133, 227 spaces 67–80, 81 n.20, 85, 120, 124, 132 artist identities 5, 53–63 myth 62 partnership 6 talent 56–7 work’s value 61 Artist as Historian, The (Godfrey) 176 artistic collaborations 4, 11, 241 n.21 community 3, 24, 58 exchange 6 periphery 68, 69 practice 1, 3–5, 8, 10, 12, 42, 44, 47, 60, 67, 69, 139, 144, 155, 164, 171, 175, 182, 195, 227–9, 234, 240 n.3 process 67, 68, 71–6 production 1, 5, 6, 8, 18, 31 n.10, 38, 41, 43, 53, 54, 58, 60–2, 107, 113, 120, 134 n.4, 194, 207 n.25, 229, 230, 235 artist-led 5, 6, 48, 54, 64 n.13, 120

Index artist-run 4, 6, 42, 48, 50 n.44, 70, 81 n.20, 85, 88, 93, 99, 125, 147 Art Journal 37–8, 43–5, 48 Art of Archaeology, The (Vilches) 176 Art of Assemblage (Seitz) 193–4 Atakton, Syspirosi 130 Atatürk Cultural Centre (AKM) 41 Athlete, The (Hughes and Savva) 95, 96 At Maroudia’s (Re Aphrodite) 7, 119, 121, 126–9, 132, 135 n.46, 201, 202 Attalidou, Katerina 10, 193, 204, 205 At the Fields (Nicolaidou) 103, 107–8 Augé, Marc 214 Autumn Collection exhibition 93, 94 Axis Photo-Coop 230 Ayios Sozomenos (Kallinikou) 139–40, 143–51, 154 n.48 Bahçeci, Uğur 44–6 Bailey, Rhea 7, 103, 110–12 Bakhtin, Mikhail 38, 41, 46 barbarism 23, 194 Barolsky, Paul 28 Barthes, Roland 146 Bayrak Radio Television Corporation (BRTK) 43, 50 n.30 Becoming Afraditi (Adil) 162 belonging 6, 60, 122, 123, 149, 152, 175, 180, 213 Bennett, Jane 14 n.30 Bennett, Jill 234 Bergson, Henri 178 Betsky, Aaron 126 Bhabha, Homi 143, 147 bicommunal art 24, 34 n.49, 229, 232–4, 237, 238 Bi-Communal Development Program 229 Birartıbır 50 n.44 Bishop, Claire 10, 238 Black, Helene 237 blank page 69, 78 body 9, 17, 21, 61, 77, 79, 87, 104, 105, 141, 163, 178, 181, 186, 201, 219, 239 Bondarchuk, Sergei 93 borderland 1, 229 Boullata, Kamal 76 boundaries 1, 7–9, 61, 77, 79, 87, 119, 122, 133, 139, 147, 149, 171, 173, 174, 176, 179, 181, 187, 193, 206

245

Bouvard and Pecuchet (Flaubert) 186 Boyd, Andrew 217 Boym, Svetlana 198 Bricks 144 Brief History of Modern and Contemporary Cypriot Art, A (Christou) 23, 104 British colonial rule 2, 5, 32 n.16, 58, 70, 86–8, 106, 107, 115, 143, 160, 175, 194–6, 199 British Museum 8, 155, 156, 163, 166–8, 171, 171 n.1 British rule 19, 22, 31 n.14, 54, 87, 91, 108, 109 Bryant, Anthony 9 Bryant, Rebecca 2, 26 Buffer Zone 2, 10, 120, 121, 149, 211–15, 218–20, 221 n.4, 229, 230, 232, 234–6, 239, 241 n.28 Butler, Judith 5, 127, 131 Byzantine art 19, 23, 25–8, 87, 140, 141, 196 Çağdaş, Cevdet 39, 41, 43 Çağdaş Sanatcilar Dernegi (Çağ-Der) 49 n.18 Çakmak, Hakan 43–5, 51 n.48 Call#192 235–6 capitalism 8, 123 Casts of an Island (Socratous) 179–81 catalogues 4, 18, 35 n.66, 42, 44 Center for Visual Arts and Research (CVAR) 120 Chapters (Epaminonda) 149–52 Chariclidou, Eleni 106 Christodoulides, Savvas 9, 173, 182–6 Christofides, Marianna 115 Christou, Chrysanthos 20, 23, 32 n.22, 32 n.23, 35 n.67, 104–5, 116 n.10 Chrysaliniotissa 121 Chrysanthou, Panicos 231, 241 n.28 Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center 126 Cinzir, Rana 235 Çizenel, Emin 42–4, 50 n.32, 233, 234, 242 n.40, 242 n.41 clandestine spaces 119, 121, 125, 126 coffee-cup and Ottoman 199–204 collaboration 4, 6, 11, 25, 49 n.18, 88, 94, 155, 174, 179, 212, 216, 218, 222 n.9, 229, 230, 235, 238, 239

246

Index

collaborative art 10 Collective Autobiography (Loizidou) 158 colonialism 1, 2, 4, 5, 17, 22, 30, 32 n.16, 38, 53, 58, 67, 69, 70, 86–8, 93, 104, 106–8, 110, 115, 124, 127, 142–4, 156, 160, 171, 175, 176, 185, 194–6, 199 commercial art gallery 61 Community Arts in Great Britain 230 community outreach 11 conceptualizing 5, 8, 58, 67, 76, 87, 95, 142, 156, 159, 171, 219 conflict 1–3, 8–11, 39, 61, 104, 119, 139, 140, 144, 154 n.48, 171, 176, 180, 193, 199, 206, 217, 220, 221 n.5, 223 n.10, 227–30, 232–5, 237, 239, 240, 240 n.3 conflict transformation art 10, 11, 227–32, 237–9, 240 n.3 Confrontation through Art 10, 211, 216– 18, 224 n.24, 225 n.27, 225 n.28 Constantinou, Costas M. 154 n.49, 236 contact zones 10, 232 contemporary practices 4, 37–9, 47, 234 contested 12, 171, 179, 186 Corcoran Gallery of Art 125 Correction (Revenioti) 7, 119, 121, 130–2 cosmopolitanism 3 Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Mercer) 17–18 Crimmin, Michaela 228 Crimp, Douglas 185 crossing boundaries 7 cultural difference 18 foundations 5 identity 7, 8, 17, 29, 139–43, 147, 149, 152, 179, 184 nomadism 77 power 8 production 5, 30, 104, 176, 222, 228, 237 system 6, 64 n.10 Culture Art Conventions 50 n.24 Culture-Art Review 37, 39, 43 culture of gossip 111–12 Curating Body/The Cached Space (Loizidou) 158, 159 curator 5, 7, 10, 24, 32 n.22, 35 n.53, 43, 59, 61, 62, 68–71, 80 n.10, 81 n.20,

105, 119, 121–5, 127–9, 131, 134 n.4, 160, 176, 188 n.29, 211, 212, 216, 218, 222 n.9, 224 n.23, 225 n.26, 230, 235, 237–9, 242 n.59 Cypriot art 7, 17–21, 24, 30, 54, 87, 104, 105 Cypriot Civil Society 216 Cypriot Olive Tree Existing in Freedom in the United Cyprus Republic, A (Hulusi) 144 Cypriot Olive Tree Existing in Occupation in North Cyprus, A (Hulusi) 144 Cypriot sculpture 23 Cyprus 30, 68, 124 history of 1–3 Cyprus Chamber of Fine Arts (E.KA.TE.) 24, 34 n.51 Cyprus (Archaeological) Museum 4, 80 n.9, 158, 159 Cyprus problem, the 2–4, 9, 35 n.53, 42, 180, 213, 220, 238 Dancing Fear and Desire: Race, Sexuality, and Imperial Politics in Middle Eastern Dance (Karayanni) 127–8 Danos, Antonis 53, 208 n.38 Dark Years 194–9 da Vinci, Leonardo 189 n.38 de Certeau, Michel 69, 71 Delaunay, Sonia 114 Deleuze, Gilles 178, 190 n.68, 193, 194, 202 Department of Cultural Services 61, 66 n.55 Derrida, Jacques 181–2, 186 Deschooling Society (Illich) 237 Details on Cyprus (Seferis) 141 Detterer, Gabriele 87 de Zegher, Catherine 71 Dezeuze, Anna 78 dialectical exhange 8 Dialogic Imagination, The (Bakhtin) 41 dialogue 1, 4, 7, 8, 11, 27, 37, 38, 43–6, 51 n.48, 119, 131, 174, 199–204, 227, 228, 232, 235, 237, 240 Diamantis, Adamantios 8, 27, 105, 116 n.15, 140–4, 146, 147, 149, 151, 153 n.19, 171 n.2 dichotomies 4, 5, 22, 30, 127, 132, 174, 217

Index difference 6, 7, 10, 18, 24, 28, 45, 76, 116 n.10, 142–4, 147, 156, 162, 165, 179, 180, 194, 199, 206, 234, 238, 239 Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (Pollock) 104 digital connectivities 3, 11, 228 discourse 1, 4, 8, 10, 17, 19, 26, 28, 30, 38, 54, 103, 105, 107, 128, 168, 173, 174, 179, 187, 199 discursive boundaries 9, 173 diverse multiplicities 9 divide and rule 2–3, 94 documentation 4, 20, 25, 37–9, 43–5, 47, 48, 79, 107, 175, 177, 181, 182, 219, 225 n.33 Downey, Anthony 211 Drake, Cathryn 70 drawing 3, 5, 10, 38, 39, 50 n.42, 56, 71, 74, 76, 78, 79, 108, 141, 144, 145, 149, 177, 178, 235 Drowned Genealogy (Adil) 164 Durell, Lawrence 35 n.67 Eastern Mediterranean (Meleagrou) 139 Economou, Costas 94 ecosystem 5 elastic metaphor 143–9 El Dahab, Mai Abu 237, 239 Elkins, James 17, 29 Ellinikotita (Greekness) 140 embedded narrative 165–7, 171 Engel, Howard 94 Engel, Marian 94 EOKA (National Organization of Cypriot Fighters) 2, 32 n.16, 221 n.5 Epaminonda, Haris 8, 115, 140, 149–51, 154 n.49, 155–7, 165, 166, 168, 170–1, 172 n.14 epiphany 56, 65 n.25 Epskamp, Kees 233 Ercan 223 n.12 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip 212 Erll, Astrid 193 Ernst, Max 177–8 Ersoy, Yaşar 49 n.18 Ertanin, Özge 10, 193, 199, 201, 202, 222 ethical turn 10 ethnic conflict 1, 2, 171, 199, 206, 227

247

Ethnic Food for the Ethnological Museum … Moussaka, An (Lapithi) 202–4 Ethnological Museum 120, 121, 124, 126–9, 132, 201 ethno-national identity 10 ethno- nationalism 10, 206, 227, 228, 232, 238 Etkenlik (Effectiveness) 45–6 Ettinger, Bracha L. 77 Eurocentrism 4, 17, 18, 21–3, 28, 30 European Mediterranean Arts Association (EMAA) 34 n.51, 44, 216, 217, 224 n.24 European modernity 1, 5, 19, 21, 196 European Union 3, 10, 58, 115, 180, 201, 216, 225 n.27 excavating 8–9, 78, 177 exhibition 4–6, 10, 18, 24, 26, 34 n.53, 38–45, 47, 48, 50 n.44, 53, 54, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64 n.13, 68, 75, 80 n.10, 81 n.21, 86, 89–91, 93, 94, 105–7, 109, 110, 119, 120, 125–8, 130–3, 188 n.29, 195, 201, 202, 213–14, 216, 218, 220, 222, 223 n.12, 223 n.17, 225 n.33, 225 n.35, 229–32, 234, 235, 237 exoticism 149–52 exotikos 150 Experimental Storytelling (Antoniou) 199, 200 Ezgin, Özgül 217, 222 n.9, 224 n.23 Fabian, Johannes 22, 26 Famagusta 9, 88, 89, 116 n.15, 177, 178, 194–9, 204–6, 207 n.16. see also Ammohostos; Magusa; Varosi Famagusta Ecocity 195 fathers of Cypriot art 7, 28, 104, 105 Faustmann, Hubert 2 femininity 107, 108 feminist 7, 103, 105–7, 115, 127, 129, 130 Filipino community 121 First Supper, The: One of You Will Not Betray Me (Çizenel) 233, 234, 242 n.40 Flaubert, Gustave 186 fluid identities 7, 9, 11, 70, 77, 79, 121, 130, 133, 139, 162, 178, 179 Fluxus Gallery 41, 49 n.21

248

Index

Following Coffee Futures (Gürsel) 200–1 Forensic Architecture (Weizmann) 240–1 n.9 Foster, Hal 38, 182 Foucault, Michel 162, 165, 172 n.8, 173, 174, 181, 187 fragmented history 4, 8, 11 incomplete 167–9 narratives 165–9, 171, 217 Gallery Apophasis 4, 6, 85–6, 91–9 Corcoran Gallery of Art 125 Fluxus 41, 49 n.21 HP 41–2, 49 n.21 Vision Art Gallery 41 Galtung, Johan 229 Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar 3 Gece Gündüz 50 n.33 gender 106 discrimination 7, 115 equality 113 identity 129–30 politics 1, 6 and sexuality 128 Genders and Power 130 geo-political 1 Georghiou, George Pol. 27, 195–8 Georgiou, Christina 218, 219 Glaser, Barney 64 n.14 global art scene 1, 70 globalization 3, 8, 21, 22, 67, 70, 76–7, 123, 133, 147 Godfrey, Mark 176 Görsel Sanatçılar Derneği 38–9 Gotland Art Meeting 11, 232–7 Greek coffee 199 Greek-Cypriot 2–4, 7, 9, 17–20, 32 n.16, 34 n.49, 34 n.52, 34 n.53, 36 n.73, 64 n.10, 87, 119, 122, 128, 134 n.4, 143, 173–6, 185, 218, 221 n.5, 230–7 ancestry and Hellenocentric identity 26–7 crossroads of East and West 20–1 culture 28–30 ethnicity 128 Eurocentrism and reification 21–3

Hellenism 25–6 history 194–5 joint exhibition 94 modernism 27–30 and Ottomans/Turks 23–5 tradition 27–30 and Turkish-Cypriot 31 n.14, 232–7 women 103–15, 218 Green Line 2–3, 35 n.53, 71, 134 n.4, 144, 218, 219, 222 n.5, 227, 235, 237. see also Buffer Zone; no-man’s land Gregoric, Alenka 218, 219, 225 n.26 Gregou, Katerina 235 Ground Beneath our Feet, The 8, 155–71, 172 n.3 grounded theory 55, 64 n.14 Gün Işığı (Daylight) 44 Gürsel, Zeynep 200–1 Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios 126–8, 201–2 Hadjikyriacou, Antonis 20, 24–5, 171 n.1 Hadjipavlou, Maria 106, 114 Halberstam, Judith 123 Hall, Stuart 3, 18, 20, 29, 30, 70, 142–3, 147 Hamilakis, Yiannis 178 Hands on Famagusta 10, 195, 205 Happening 44–7 Haraway, Donna 67 Harvey, David 133 Hatay, Mete 25 Head of a Woman (Kashalos) 155 hegemonic narratives 11, 182 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe) 238 Hellenism 23, 25–6, 175 Hellenocentrism 4, 17, 23–30, 120, 142, 174, 175, 185 heterogeneous 12, 18, 58, 70, 123, 143, 151, 182, 193, 194, 206 heteronormativity 7, 119, 122, 123 heterosexual culture 123, 124, 127, 131 hierarchical distinction 71, 72 historical discontinuity 8, 173, 181 historical writings 9, 194 historicity 9, 11, 173 Hoak-Doering, Elizabeth 9, 166, 168, 170, 171, 173, 177–9, 189 n.36 homogeneity 181, 206

Index homosexual culture 88, 90, 122, 123 HP Gallery 41–2, 49 n.21 Hughes, Glyn 6, 85–8, 90–9 Hulusi, Mustafa 8, 140, 144 human rights 10, 239, 241 n.9 Huyssen, Andreas 193 hybrid 3, 6, 7, 58, 124, 127, 139, 141, 143, 151, 174 identity 1, 3–10, 12, 17, 18, 20, 22, 24–6, 29, 30, 39, 40, 47, 48, 53–5, 57–63, 77, 114, 123, 127, 129, 132, 133, 139–49, 151, 152, 170, 173–7, 179–81, 184–6, 198, 203, 204, 212, 227, 236 ideological 3, 4, 17, 19, 24, 25, 28, 29, 68–70, 122, 141, 181, 185, 214, 215, 217, 235 I Don’t Know if I am Convincing; the city seems not to trust me any more (Attalidou and Karababas) 204–5 Illich, Ivan 237 imperialism 8 İnatçi, Ümit 34 n.49, 49 n.21 independence 4, 5, 18, 22, 24, 34 n.52, 54, 60, 87, 93, 106, 194 Infinite Library, The 170, 172 n.14 intercommunal 227, 229, 230, 232, 233 interconnected spaces 5, 67, 73–4 internal calling 55 international artists 59 International Foundation Manifesta (IFM) 237–9 interruption 22 Interview Project, The 43 Ioannou, Elli 106 itinerant 5, 67, 76, 78, 82 n.34 Jameson, Fredric 133 Jasmin, Michaël 175 Kafaridou, Marianna 7, 115 kafes 199 kahveh 199 kahwa 199 Kallinikou, Stelios 8, 140, 143–6, 149 Kanthos, Telemachos 27, 105, 116 n.15 Kaplan, Caren 11–12 Kappler, Matthias 25

249

Kapur, Geeta 28–30 Karababas, Stefanos 204, 205 Karagil, Nurtane 44–6 karagoz 195, 196 Karayanni, Stavros Stavrou 127–8 Kashalos, Michael 155 Kassianidou, Marina 72–6 kazantin 144 Kelly, Julia 194, 232 Keshishian, Ruth 93, 94 Kester, Grant 234, 236–7 Killoran, Moira 3 Kintsugi 168, 170, 171 Kintsukuroi 160, 168 Kıbrıs Sanat Dergisi (Cyprus Art Review) 39, 49 n.9 Kıbrıs Türk Resim ve Heykel Sanatında Dün-Bügün (Yesterday and Today of Turkish Cypriot Art and Sculpture) 40 Kkasialos, Michael 25–6 KLYS 233 Knapp, Bernard 175 Kokkinos, Giorgos 225 n.28 Kosova, Erden 235 koupes 195 Koutsaftis, Filippos 168 Krasides, Christos 130 Kültür-Sanat Dergisi (Culture-Art Review) 37, 40, 49 n.23 Kwon, Miwon 67, 77, 78 Kykkos Monastery 213–14, 225 n.35 Kypriotismos (Cypriotisme) 143 Kyriakides, Christos 131 Laclau, Ernesto 238, 239, 243 n.69 Lambrou, Christina 163–4, 166–8, 170 Land Rover Approached the Village, A (Black Rainbow) 147–8 Landsberg, Alison 234, 242 n.42 landscape 1, 6–8, 68, 88, 91, 109, 110, 121, 124, 139–52, 175, 185, 196, 230, 235, 237, 238 Lapithi, Lia 7, 10, 115, 193, 199, 202, 203 Leaps of Faith 11, 228, 234–7 Leaving the Harbor of Haloes 178 Lederach, John Paul 228 Ledra/Lokmaci checkpoint 213, 214, 219, 220

250

Index

Ledra Palace 89, 91, 230–2, 236 Ledras 121 Lehman, Kim 61 Lellos Demetriades 229 Leontis, Artemis 142, 143 Let’s Get Lost (Loizidou) 159 LGBTQ community 122, 123 Limassol studio 72–4, 89, 90, 99 Liminici, Sibel 38 Lipertis, Dimitris 36 n.77 local art scene 1, 11, 61, 70 locality 1, 5, 12, 78, 147 Local Studies (Kallinikou) 143–4 Locher, Hubert 104 Loizidou, Chrystalleni 126 Loizidou, Maria 8, 155–6, 158, 159, 172 n.7, 235 Loizos, Peter 236 lokmades 195 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 38 McCall, George 60 MacDonald, Sharon 11 McLuhan, Marshall 87 Magusa 205 mainstream culture 121–2 Makrides, Angelos 8, 140, 144, 145 Manifesta 6 (M6) 11, 237–9, 242 n.57 Mapplethorpe, Robert 7, 119, 121, 125–6, 131–3 Marangou, Anna 198 Marangou, Niki 233 margins 6, 7, 30, 70, 120, 149, 150 marking process 71–6 materiality 1, 7, 9, 141, 151, 155, 170, 171, 174–6, 179, 194, 206 Matter and Memory (Bergson) 178 Medium Is the Message, The (McLuhan) 87 medium of exchange 8 Mehmet, Ilkay 230 Meleagrou, Ivi 139, 152, 152 n.2 Memories of the Yard (Bailey) 103, 110–12 memory 1, 9–11, 14 n.33, 65 n.35, 149, 157, 159, 160, 168, 170, 173, 178, 181, 182, 193–5, 198, 199, 201, 202, 204, 206, 211, 212, 217, 219, 234 memos 64 n.12 Mercer, Kobena 17–18 Meskimmon, Marsha 7

metaphor 7, 8, 127, 143–9, 157, 158, 168, 171, 176, 178, 180, 186, 198, 203 methodologies 3, 9, 11, 19, 55, 64 n.14, 67, 68, 162, 173, 174, 176, 185, 187 n.8, 217 metronormativity 124 Michaelidou, Despina 7, 119, 121, 129–30, 132 Michailidi, Agni 195–9, 204, 205 Middle East 1, 10, 93, 121, 127, 176, 179, 180, 193, 195, 227 military 2, 7, 9, 21, 90, 115, 124, 149, 212, 213, 221 n.4, 221 n.5, 227, 235, 239 Ministry of Education and Culture 32 n.22, 56, 68, 195 Misselwitz, Philip 227 Mitchell, David Oswald 217 Mitzi, Elli 106 mobility 71, 74, 77–8, 139, 147, 194 Modern Greek Painting and Cyprus of the 19th and 20th Century 26 modernism 1–6, 9, 12, 17–30, 33 n.42, 36 n.82, 38, 42, 53, 54, 58, 66 n.55, 70, 87, 89, 90, 93, 104, 105, 107–10, 112, 124, 126, 127, 133, 140, 141–3, 147, 175, 185, 194, 195–7, 207 n.25, 212 modernization 3, 4, 17, 22, 141, 197 mono-culturalism 196–7 motherland 2, 26, 32 n.16, 87, 175 Mouffe, Chantal 238, 239, 243 n.69 Mourning Rock, The (Koutsaftis) 168 multivocal 4, 175 Museum of Modern Art 193 Myres, John 175 narrative 3, 4, 6–8, 11, 18, 21, 23–5, 28–30, 37, 38, 41–3, 47, 48, 55–7, 62, 65 n.35, 69, 74, 85, 86, 99, 123, 126, 127, 129, 132, 155–7, 160, 162–9, 171, 175, 180, 182, 185–7, 194–9, 202, 204–6, 228, 236, 239 nationalism 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 17, 20, 24–30, 32 n.16, 41, 61, 69, 77, 87, 88, 103, 105, 123, 125, 127, 128, 130, 143, 167, 180, 194, 198, 202–4, 206, 207 n.25, 212, 227, 228, 232, 238 nationalist trends 10, 193 Navaro-Yashin, Yael 9

Index negotiations 7, 11, 30, 62, 76–9, 109, 115, 140, 143, 149, 155, 179, 222 n.5, 222 n.9 NeMe IDEODROME 2009 199 Neoterismoi Toumazou 8, 140, 147–9 neoterismos 147 New Cyprus Association 34 n.49 newspaper articles 4, 5, 148 Nicolaidou, Loukia 7, 103, 105–10, 116 n.12 Nicosia 3, 7, 8, 10, 41, 42, 88–90, 93, 119, 124, 125, 227–9, 237–9 Gotland meeting 232–7 orientation 122–5 queer scene 132, 133 queer subcultures and mainstream 121–2 urban regeneration and art scene 119–21 Nicosia for Art Organisation (NfA) 237–9, 242 n.58 Nicosia International Airport 10, 211, 212, 214 Nicosia Master Plan (NMP) 229 Nicosia Municipal Arts Center (NiMAC) 120, 121, 124, 126, 128, 130–2, 147, 237, 238 Nicosia Municipal Market 130–2 Nikita, Eleni S. 20, 32 n.22, 94, 105, 106, 116 n.12, 117 n.16, 195–7 nineteenth century 4, 17, 19, 57, 107, 126, 175, 201 Nochlin, Linda 114 no-man’s land 2, 9 non-commercial art venues 61 non-commercial associations 87–8 nostalgia 195, 198, 206 object-ness 8, 166, 171 occupation and control 211–15 Occupy Buffer Zone movement. see Buffer Zone Off Limits 11, 228, 230–2 Offshore Dreaming; Aphrodite’s Gas Field (Adil) 160, 162 Old Famagusta, The (Michailidi) 195 Old Varosi, The (Michailidi) 195, 197, 205 Oliva, Achille Bonito 76, 77 Olsen, Bjørnar 146, 151

251

Onar, Anber 42–4, 46 Onasagorou 121 One Place after Another (Kwon) 67 Örs, Umure 38 orthodox 1, 6, 9, 127, 141, 173, 174, 187 otherness 10, 144, 145, 150, 151, 217 Ottomans 23–5, 126–7, 193–9 Öze, Erhan 223 n.12 Palm Trees (Kallinikou) 145–6 Pan 109–10 Panayiotou, Christodoulos 8, 155, 160, 161, 163–9, 172 n.5, 187 n.8 Papadakis, Yiannis 25, 154 n.49 Papargyriou, Eleni 141, 166, 168, 169 Papastergiadis, Nikos 6, 8, 139, 147, 151, 152 Paraskevaidou, Pavlina 10, 211, 212, 220, 222 n.9, 224 n.23 Paraskos, Stass 116 n.15 Parker, Rozsika 107 Parpa, Elena 164, 165 Parthenis, Constantinos 27, 36 n.70 Parthogh, Georges Der 92, 231 patlikanmousakka 202 patriarchal 7, 103, 105–13, 115, 150 peace-building 228–30, 232–5, 237 Pellapaisiotis, Haris 230–2, 235–7 peoples and civilisations 20–1 Perfect Moment, The (Mapplethorpe) 125–6 performative 5, 127, 162, 182 Pericleous, Vicky 222 n.9 peripatetic 5, 67, 71, 79 periphery 1, 3–5, 21, 22, 30, 53, 67–70, 76, 77, 79, 105, 129, 147, 204, 239 Peslikas, Polys 155 petit récits (little narratives) 4, 37, 48 Phaneromeni Square 120, 121, 130, 131 Phedonos, Pauline 113, 114 Phillippou, Nicos 109 photography 10, 43, 125, 130, 141–2, 144–6, 151, 193, 200, 229, 230 Pictures (Crimp) 185 Pillai, Johann 42 Pilo, Carl 160 Pink House (Kallinikou) 145 Pioneer Women Artists in Greece and Cyprus (Nikita and Schina) 105–7

252 Pizanias, Katerina 238 place 7–9, 12, 219–20 and body 219 decontextualizing things and 149 and identity 139–52 landscape and 142 Plans and Renovations (Kassianidou) 75 Point Centre of Contemporary Art 179 political mechanisms 11 politics and aesthetics 10 and art 10 of exoticism 149–52 identity 143 negotiating 9–11 subtle difference 198–9 and violence 227 Pollock, Griselda 9, 104, 107 postcolonial 4, 6, 17, 22, 28, 30, 69, 91, 99, 104, 112, 139, 143, 172 n.3, 194, 230 potentiality 78, 215–21 print culture 39, 43 professional status 109, 115, 116 n.9 Proinos 109 Proposition (Ertanin) 201–2 Proussis, Costas 143 psychologization 178 queer counterpublics 123 identities 123, 127, 129, 130, 132, 133 lives 7, 119, 124 orientation 122–5 subcultures 7, 121–2, 125–33 Rabasa, José 69 Rancière, Jacques 10 Reading, Anna 194 Re Aphrodite 7, 119, 121, 126–9, 201, 202 reflection 1, 5, 7, 11, 38, 39, 41, 46, 53, 59, 107, 115, 141, 143, 144, 146, 214 reification 236 re-mediation of photography 10, 193 remembering 9, 130, 166 Republic of Cyprus 2, 6, 34 n.52, 34 n.53, 38, 47, 54, 64 n.10, 85, 86, 91, 169, 195, 221–2 n.5, 238 dawn of the 87–8

Index residency 5, 58, 59, 67, 68, 70–4, 77, 79, 120, 121, 123, 179, 235, 237 Revenioti, Paola 7, 119, 121, 130–3 reverse culture shock 58, 65 n.39 Rieniets, Tim 227 Roelstraete, Dieter 176 Rooftop 216, 217, 224 n.24 Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf) 114 Røyseng, Sigrid 57 rubbing process 178 Rushdie, Salman 172 n.3 ruthless ruler 194 Saint Mama 147–8 Sanat Guncesi (Art Journal) 37, 46 “Sanat Yaşantımız” (Our Artistic Lives) 43 Sanat Yazıları (Writings on Art) 39 sandstorm 179–80 Sarajevo Winter Festival 2016 199 Sarayönü Fine Arts Museum 42 Sassen, Saskia 215 Savva, Andreas 214, 220 Savva, Christoforos 6, 27–8, 36 n.72, 85, 86, 88–9, 91–9 Savvides, Pambos 220 Schina, Athena 105 secular art 19, 21 Seferis, George 140–2, 152 n.7 Segalen, Victor 150–1 Seitz, William 193–4 Senova, Basak 10, 214, 218–20, 224 n.23 Seremetakis, Nadia 201 X (Lifesize Bearded Votary in Egyptian Dress) (Panayiotou) 161 sexuality 109, 122–4, 127, 128, 170 Shanks, Michael 175–6 shared spaces 10, 232 Simmons, Jerry 60 site-specificity 77 Situated Knowledges (Haraway) 67 6|July h.b. glyn (Happy Birthday) (Savva) 98 Sleeping with the Hand Upright (Christodoulides) 182–5 Small Collage on Apophasis Gallery Letter Headed Paper (Savva) 97 social change 228, 230 social-economic change 109 socially engaged art 10, 227, 228, 239

Index social media 43, 47, 69, 131, 147, 215 socio-historical approach 106 socio-political 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 87, 94, 103–5, 107, 108, 110, 152, 173, 175, 234, 237 Socratous, Socratis 9, 173, 179–82, 222 Soja, Edward William 133 Solomou, Emilios 2 Son Kullanim Tarihi (SKT) (Expiration Date) 45–6 Sonya, Zehra 34 n.53 Space Next to Kala Kathoumena, The 121, 124, 129–33 space of encounter 8, 152 spatio-temporal remoteness 140–3 Spivak, Gayatri 6 Spoil Heap (Panayiotou) 160 Stain Painting (Kassianidou) 72–4 State Gallery of Contemporary Cypriot Art 105, 116 n.7, 120, 155 Stavrides, Stavros 214, 215, 220 Stephanides, Katy 112 Stephanides, Stephanos 127 Stepping over the Borders 218, 219 stillness 77–8 Stratis, Socrates 235 Strauss, Anselm 64 n.14 studio space 60–3, 71 Stylianou, Elena 109 subjectivities 6, 28, 79, 139, 174, 181, 199 Swedish Cyprus Expedition 160, 175 symbolic domination 17, 22, 28 synergy 6, 85, 88, 91–5, 99 tableaux vivants 149, 151 Taktakalas 121 Taliotis, Demetris 126 Temporary Autonomous Zone (T.A.Z) 217–18 Terra Mediterranea—In Crisis 126 Thinking the city 236 Thkio Ppalies 120 Three Ships from St. George of the Greeks (Hoak-Doering) 177–9 Tisseron, Serge 71 topio 7, 139, 142, 143, 145 topography 140, 143–9 topos 7, 8, 139–46, 152 Toumazis, Yiannis 189 n.36, 237, 238

253

Toumazou, Argyro 217, 222 n.9, 229–30, 241 n.21 traditional 2, 4, 20, 22, 24, 25, 27–30, 34 n.51, 38, 47, 54, 62, 86–8, 94, 95, 107–9, 111, 131, 144, 172 n.12, 174, 176, 182, 185–7, 193, 196, 197, 204 transcultural 7, 9, 11, 193–4 coffee and 199–204 Famagusta 204–6 Ottoman rule 194–9 Transfer, A (Loizidou) 158 transmedial 10, 193, 194, 202, 204, 206 trauma 3, 144, 148. 200, 201, 206, 217 tribalization 76–7 Tsarouchis, Yiannis 36 n.75 Tselementes, Nikolaos 202–4 Tselika, Evanthia 126 Turkish 2, 23, 34 n.49, 39, 41, 43, 54, 89, 91, 124, 128, 141, 143, 152, 185, 195, 197, 199, 205, 212, 221 n.5, 235 Turkish coffee 199 Turkish-Cypriot 2–4, 14 n.32, 24, 31 n.14, 34–5 n.53, 34 n.49, 34 n.51, 34 n.52, 37–8, 47–8, 49 n.23, 94, 103, 115, 119, 134 n.4, 143, 144, 148, 187 n.8, 194, 196, 197, 199, 201, 202, 212, 213, 216, 218, 221–2 n.5, 221 n.4, 222 n.9, 229–37, 241 n.28 art and culture 38–43 Happening 44–7 mass culture 43–4 Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) 35 n.53 Turks 23, 33 n.43 UNCOVERED: Nicosia International Airport 10, 211–16, 218, 220, 222–3 n.9, 223 n.12, 223 n.17, 224 n.23, 225 n.27, 225 n.35 UNDP-ACT 222 n.9, 229 UN Goods Office 212, 213, 222 n.9, 223 n.12, 225 n.27 unification 2, 222 n.5 United Nations (UN) 2, 10, 212, 221 n.5, 227 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 34 n.49, 222 n.9, 229

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United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 233 United Nations Peace Keeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) 2, 9 United Nations Plaza 243 n.65 United States 67, 80, 80 n.10, 125, 215 University of Technology 54 Untitled #02 b/h (Epaminonda) 157 Untitled History 42, 47 Urban Drag and Small Homelands (Michaelidou) 7, 119, 121, 129–30, 132 urban regeneration 119–21 USAID 34 n.49, 229, 232 Varosi 195, 197, 205 Vassiliadou, Myria 111–12 Venice Biennial 4 Very Sweet [Coffee] of Cyprus, The 198–9 Vidokle, Anton 237, 239, 243 n.65 Vilches, Flora 176 Virilio, Paul 211–12 virtuality 9 visibility and invisibility 78–9 Vision Art Gallery 41 visual appropriation 8 visual artist 53–63, 63 n.7, 68–9 Voicing the Line (Georgiou and Akin) 218, 219 Volumes (Epaminonda) 150, 158 VOL. XXIII, Secession, Vienna (Epaminonda) 156 wabi-sabi 169, 170, 172 n.12 Waiting Lounge (Savva) 220 Waldman, Diane 189 n.38 Waldvogel, Florian 237, 239

Wall Drawing I (Kassianidou) 76 wall drawings 74, 76, 79 walled city 120, 121, 195, 197 Washing-Up Ladies 7, 115 Weizmann, Eyal 240 n.9 Western art 1, 17, 18, 22, 27, 28, 41, 47, 69, 89, 184 canon 3, 18 hegemony 4, 17, 22 invention 8 modernism 3, 19, 21–3, 26, 42 Wickham, M. 61 Winckelmann, Johann 160 women artist 6, 7, 103–7, 109, 110, 112–15, 116 n.6, 116 n.10, 116 n.11 domestic relationships 106, 113–14 employment for 112–13 in exhibitions and curatorial practices 105–6 Greek-Cypriot 103–15, 218 sexual liberation and gradual transition 109 Woolf, Virginia 114 Write CY 120 Xenaki, Persefoni T. 106 X Portfolio (Mapplethorpe) 7, 119, 121, 125–6, 132 Yashin, Neshe 233 Young Muslim Woman (Chanoumaki) (Christodoulides) 182–5 Zelizer, Craig 229, 233 Zincir, Rana 42

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